The Historical and International Foundations of The Socialist Equality Party Sri Lanka

Adopted unanimously by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at
its founding congress in Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011, this document is

vital for a deeper understanding of the problems of development of
the revolutionary movement on the Indian subcontinent. It draws the
critical lessons of the Fourth International's 75-year struggle for
Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution in South Asia. The
founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by
leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) who had escaped
British jails in Ceylon, marked a decisive advance for the Fourth
International in Asia. The document traces the rise, decline and
ultimate betrayal of the LSSP, which joined the 1964 coalition
government of Madame Sirima Bandaranaike, abandoning the
struggle to unify the Tamil and Sinhalese working class, and opening
the road to the bloody 25-year civil war from 1983 to 2009. The
SEP’s forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), was
founded in 1968 to draw the necessary political lessons from the
LSSP’s betrayal and to rearm the working class politically on the
basis of the Trotskyist program fought for by the ICFI. The document
sums up the lessons of the RCL’s principled and courageous struggle
against all forms of nationalism and communalism.
Adopted by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at its 2011 founding
congress in Colombo, this document depicts the 75-year struggle of the
Fourth International in South Asia for Trotsky’s theory of Permanent
Revolution.
The founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by

leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) who had escaped British
jails in Ceylon, marked a decisive advance for the Fourth International in
Asia. The document traces the rise, decline and ultimate betrayal of the
LSSP, which joined the 1964 coalition government of Madame Sirima
Bandaranaike, abandoning the struggle to unify the Tamil and Sinhalese
working class, and opening the road to the bloody 25-year civil war from
1983 to 2009.
1. Introduction
2. The Theory of Permanent Revolution
3. The formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
4. The LSSP’s turn to the Fourth International
5. The founding of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India
6. The Quit India movement
7. Stalinism betrays post-war revolutionary upheavals
8. The Chinese Revolution
9. The partition of India
10. Formal independence in Sri Lanka
11. The liquidation of the BLPI
12. Pabloite Opportunism
13. The LSSP’s response to the Open Letter
14. The LSSP’s political backsliding
15. The SWP reunification
16. The Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka
17. The formation of the RCL
18. The RCL’s struggle against petty-bourgeois radicalism
19. The political degeneration of the British SLL
20. The collapse of the second coalition government
21. The UNP government and the descent into war
22. The RCL, the WRP and the national question
23. The 1985–1986 split with the WRP
24. After the split with the WRP
25. The United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam
26. The International Perspectives of the ICFI
27. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
28. The RCL and the United Front
29. The RCL and the peasantry
30. The National Question
31. The Socialist Equality Party
32. The World Socialist Web Site
33. The Sri Lankan crisis of 2000
34. War and militarism
35. The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of the SEP
World Socialist Web Site wsws.org
The Historical and International Foundations

of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 1
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
26 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and it into competition in the Indian Ocean with Japan, India and above all,
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) the US. Every corner of Asia, including Sri Lanka, is caught up in this
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in rivalry that is leading inexorably to a catastrophic conflict. Unlike the first
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It will be posted in 12 parts. two world wars that focussed on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a new
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 conflagration is likely to be centred in the Indian Ocean.
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 1-5. Asia is destined to become a vast arena not only of inter-imperialist
rivalries but also of the social revolution. Economic expansion has created
1. Introduction huge new battalions of the working class. China alone has an urban
1-1. The Socialist Equality Party is the Sri Lankan section of the workforce of 400 million. Moreover, the social gulf between rich and
International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of poor has widened in every country. China, which has the second largest
socialist revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. The ICFI number of billionaires in the world, also has at least 250 million people
represents the continuation of the political and theoretical struggles waged living below the poverty line. In India, obscene wealth exists alongside
by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky for the political independence of the the world’s greatest concentration of poverty. None of these immense
working class. It is the only political party seeking to mobilise, educate social contradictions can be resolved on the basis of capitalism. The sharp
and unite workers internationally for the overthrow of the outmoded deterioration of living standards since 2008, as governments imposed the
capitalist system and the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis. costs of the crisis on working people, has already propelled millions into
1-2. The onset of the greatest economic breakdown since the Great struggle in Europe and in Tunisia, Egypt and the Middle East. It will drive
Depression of the 1930s, which began with the global financial crash in workers throughout Asia and internationally to fight for decent living
2008, signifies that capitalism has entered into a new period of systemic standards and democratic rights and against militarism and war. These
crisis. In every country, the ruling class seeks to shore up its position by struggles must be integrated into a global counteroffensive by the working
undermining its international rivals, on the one hand, and by imposing class to abolish the bankrupt profit system and its outmoded nation- state
new burdens on the working class, on the other. The former is greatly system and replace it with a world-planned socialist economy.
exacerbating global tensions, conflicts and the drive to war, while the 1-6. The bitter lesson of the twentieth century, however, is that the
latter is fuelling the class struggle and opening up a new period of working class cannot spontaneously take power. That requires the
revolutionary upheavals. building of revolutionary leaderships based on an assimilation of all of the
1-3. The global crisis is centred in the heart of world capitalism—the critical historical experiences of the working class. The International
United States. The advanced decay of American capitalism and the rise of Committee of the Fourth International is the embodiment of the lessons
new powers in Asia—especially China—have dramatically sharpened derived from the protracted struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and
inter-imperialist rivalries. The reckless attempts by the US to offset its all forms of opportunism. That rich legacy is summed up in The
economic decline through the use of military force have already produced Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
a series of wars, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at adopted by the SEP (United States), which also constitutes the basis of the
establishing an American stranglehold over the energy-rich regions of political work of the SEP in Sri Lanka.
Central Asia and the Middle East. These conflicts arise out of the
fundamental contradictions of the profit system—between the world 2. The Theory of Permanent Revolution
economy and the outmoded nation-state system and between socialised 2-1. Central to a scientific, that is a Marxist, revolutionary perspective is
production and private ownership of the means of production. The Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution—an integrated
globalisation of production has raised these contradictions to a new pitch conception of world socialist revolution that encompasses the backward
of intensity. colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as the advanced ones. First
1-4. The rise of China, and to a lesser extent India, over the past two formulated in the wake of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Theory of
decades has dramatically shifted the centre of gravity of world politics Permanent Revolution was developed in opposition to the two-stage
towards Asia. China has risen from the world’s 10th largest economy in perspective of the Menshevik faction of Russian Social Democracy. The
1990 to overtake Japan in 2010 and become the second largest after the Mensheviks held that Russia must first undergo a prolonged period of
US. China’s burgeoning industries compel it to import vast quantities of capitalist development before the socialist revolution was possible. They
raw materials, including oil and gas from the Middle East and Africa. concluded therefore that the proletariat had to ally itself with the liberal
China is building a blue-water navy to secure its shipping lanes, bringing bourgeoisie in carrying out the basic tasks of the democratic
© World Socialist Web Site

revolution—the destruction of the Czarist autocracy and the radical defeat of the Chinese Revolution was above all the responsibility of the
transformation of land relations in rural areas. Soviet bureaucracy headed by Stalin, which had arisen in conditions of
2-2. Trotsky, along with Lenin, demonstrated the organic incapacity of the continued isolation and backwardness of the Soviet Union, and
the Russian bourgeoisie—dependent on international finance capital, tied usurped power from the working class. Under the banner of “Socialism in
to the rural landlords and fearful of the emerging working class—to carry One Country”, the Stalinist bureaucracy increasingly transformed the
out the democratic tasks. Trotsky and Lenin both foresaw that the natural Third International from the organising centre of the world socialist
ally of the proletariat against the Czarist autocracy was the revolution into a pliant tool of Soviet foreign policy and used the
multi-millioned peasantry. But Lenin’s formula of a “democratic communist parties to manoeuvre with bourgeois parties and governments.
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, while imparting a In China, Stalin revived the Menshevik two-stage theory, insisting that
particularly radical character to the democratic revolution, left unresolved imperialist oppression compelled the national bourgeoisie to play a
the political relationship between the two classes. Notwithstanding the revolutionary role. His subordination of the young Chinese Communist
daring nature of his conceptions, Lenin did not regard the democratic Party (CCP) to the bourgeois Kuomintang (KMT), which he hailed as the
dictatorship as the instrument for the socialist reorganisation of society, vanguard of the Chinese Revolution, resulted in crushing defeats for the
but rather as the means for giving the fullest scope to the development of revolutionary movement—first in Shanghai in April 1927 at the hands of
capitalism. KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, and then in Wuhan by the “left” KMT
2-3. Trotsky’s conclusions went further. On the basis of an examination government in July 1927.
of the entire historical record, he insisted that the peasantry was unable to 2-7. Trotsky and the Left Opposition, formed in 1923 to politically
play any independent revolutionary role. Given the inability of the combat the Stalinist bureaucracy, subjected Stalin’s policies to a
bourgeoisie to resolve the democratic tasks, it fell to the proletariat at the withering critique and in doing so enriched the Theory of Permanent
head of the insurgent masses to carry out the bourgeois democratic Revolution. Trotsky, who had strenuously fought for the political
revolution through the establishment of “a dictatorship of the proletariat independence of the CCP from the KMT, explained that imperialism did
that leads the peasant masses behind it.” The essential ingredient was a not weld the national bourgeoisie together with the proletariat, the
vigorous and consistent struggle by the revolutionary party for the peasantry and intelligentsia into a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” as
political independence of the working class from all factions of the Stalin claimed. Trotsky wrote: “[E]verything that brings the oppressed
bourgeoisie. Having seized power, however, the proletariat would of and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the
necessity be compelled to carry out the revolutionary tasks through its national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class
own class methods, and would inevitably make deep inroads into the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants
private ownership of the means of production. In other words, it would be is not weakened, but, on the contrary, it is sharpened by imperialist
forced to begin the reorganisation of society on socialist lines, and in oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every point.”[2] As the
doing so link its fate to the European and world socialist revolution. revolutionary tide ebbed in 1927, Stalin criminally ordered the mutilated
2-4. Trotsky’s theory of the class dynamics of the Russian Revolution CCP in Canton and other cities to improvise insurrections that were
flowed from his conception of the world socialist revolution as an doomed to defeat. The Canton Commune was timed to coincide with the
integrated, though not simultaneous, process. The social revolution in Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—to
Russia could not be confined to one country, but, would be compelled for demonstrate Stalin’s “revolutionary” credentials as he expelled the Left
its survival to extend onto the international stage. “The conquest of power Opposition en masse and sent Trotsky into exile.
by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it. 2-8. In the course of the twentieth century, the subordination of the
Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class working class to the so-called “progressive” bourgeoisie under the banner
struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle, under of the “two-stage theory” and the “bloc of four classes” has invariably
conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships ended in disastrous defeat. At the same time, the Stalinists and their
on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally apologists have waged a relentless campaign of vilification against
to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the Trotskyism in general and the Theory of Permanent Revolution in
permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of particular. However, Trotsky’s astonishing theoretical insights more than
whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday a century ago remain the essential guide for workers and youth seeking a
accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country, revolutionary road forward. Nowhere has the struggle for the Theory of
which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and Permanent Revolution been more thoroughly fought out than in Sri
parliamentarism.” [1] Lanka. The rich strategic experiences of the struggle for Trotskyism on
2-5. The revolutionary events of 1917 in Russia verified Trotsky’s this small island, embodied in the SEP, provide vital lessons for the
Theory of Permanent Revolution in all its essentials. On his return from building of mass revolutionary parties throughout Asia, Africa, Latin
exile in April 1917, Lenin took sharp issue with the Bolshevik leaders, America and around the world.
including Stalin, who were giving critical support to the bourgeois
Provisional Government which had formed after the overthrow of the 3. The formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
Czar in February. In his April Theses, Lenin broke from his formula of 3-1. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) was founded in December
the democratic dictatorship and in practice adopted the standpoint of 1935 by members of the Youth Leagues in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) which
Permanent Revolution. He called for the working class to oppose the had opposed the limited constitutional reform of 1931 that provided for an
Provisional Government and to take power through the workers’ elected State Council to advise the British colonial administration.
councils, or Soviets, that emerged with the fall of the Czar. Lenin’s Inspired by the mass independence movement in India, the Youth
reorientation of the Bolshevik Party laid the basis for the October Leagues not only demanded an end to British rule, but, amid the social
Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of a Soviet government, which distress caused by the Great Depression, turned towards socialism.
gave a mighty impetus to the processes of world socialist revolution. 3-2. The Youth Leagues had struck roots among workers and the rural
2-6. The Chinese Revolution of 1925–27 also confirmed the poor. They challenged the control of A.E. Goonesinha over the trade
farsightedness of the Theory of Permanent Revolution in countries of union movement in Colombo, most effectively in the 1933 strike at the
belated capitalist development, albeit tragically and in the negative. The Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills. Goonesinha had led significant

union struggles in the 1920s, but in the 1930s, under conditions of mass India—the Muslim League founded in 1907 and the All India Hindu
unemployment, functioned as a strike breaker and purveyor of Mahasabha in 1915—that, insofar as they opposed British rule at all, did so
anti-immigrant and anti-Tamil racism. In 1934, the Youth Leagues from the standpoint of preserving the privileges of the traditional Muslim
launched a broad campaign to assist the victims of a malaria epidemic, and Hindu elites. In Sri Lanka, the CNC rested on the Buddhist revivalism
which, compounded by the malnutrition caused by falling incomes and of the Sinhala elites who were hostile to the island’s Tamil and Muslim
poor harvests, caused at least 100,000 deaths. minorities. The CNC split on communal lines in 1921 when the leadership
3-3. From the outset, the LSSP contained diverse elements. Its refused to accede to the demands of its president, prominent Tamil leader
formation took place against the backdrop of mounting reaction centred in Ponnambalam Arunachalam, over Tamil representation. The
Europe. Hitler had come to power in 1933 in Germany as a result of the organisations of the Tamil and Muslim elites in Sri Lanka distinguished
criminal policies of Stalin and the Third International whose ultra-left themselves from the CNC only by their even greater subservience to
“Third Period” line, adopted in 1928, split and paralysed the German British rule.
working class. In opposition to the Stalinist policy of denouncing the 3-8. The abiding fear of all sections of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie was
Social Democratic Party (SPD) as “social fascists”, Trotsky had fought the emergence of a powerful, combative working class. The proletariat
for a united front of the German Communist Party and the SPD. The was concentrated in the tea plantations to which Tamil-speaking workers
tactic of the united front was based on unity in action around concrete had been brought from southern India as indentured labour. By 1921,
objectives, without any mixing of political programs, slogans or banners. plantation workers and their families numbered around 500,000 out of the
Its purpose was to mobilise the strength of the working class against the island’s total population of 4.5 million. An urban proletariat also
Nazis and their storm troopers, while exposing the perfidy of the Social developed in Colombo especially in the docks, railway workshops and
Democratic leadership. After the coming to power of the Nazis failed to emerging industries. In India, the INC under Mohandas Karamchand
provoke any criticism of Stalin’s policies within the Third International, Gandhi sought in a limited and tightly-controlled manner to appeal to the
Trotsky concluded that the working class must turn to the building of a anti-colonial sentiment and socio-economic grievances of the masses, so
new international—the Fourth International. as to pressure the British for concessions. In Sri Lanka, the CNC did not
3-4. Prominent in the LSSP leadership was a layer of brilliant young call for independence from British rule and waged no public campaigns
people who had studied in America and Britain. Amid the intellectual for either political or social reforms. Its organic hostility to the masses
ferment produced by the political upheavals in Europe and internationally, was reflected in its fierce opposition to the introduction of universal
they were strongly influenced by Trotsky’s writings. The foremost among suffrage on the recommendation of the British government’s
these was Philip Gunawardena, who studied in America before moving to Donoughmore Commission as part of the 1931 constitutional reform.
Britain in 1928. He joined the British Communist Party but was expelled 3-9. Thus, in the 1930s, as layers of the intelligentsia were radicalised
after criticising Stalin’s policies in India and China. Those who were part by the oppressive conditions in Sri Lanka, the political upheavals in
of his circle included Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, N.M. Europe and the growing danger of war, their views found no outlet within
Perera and Vernon Gunasekere. the Colombo political establishment. Unlike India, no Communist Party
3-5. The LSSP, however, also included Stalinist sympathisers and had formed in Sri Lanka. The only party based on the working class was
radical bourgeois nationalists. This mixed membership was reflected in the Labour Party formed in 1928 by the Colombo trade union boss
the party’s amorphous program. Its manifesto declared that the party’s Goonesinha under the tutelage of the British Labour Party. It did not
fundamental aim was the establishment of a socialist society through “the support independence or advocate socialism and was deeply hostile to
socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange of Marxism. The LSSP thus became the political home for various
commodities.” It called for “the attainment of national independence” and tendencies—those who were drawn towards Trotskyism, as well as militant
“the abolition of economic and political inequality and oppression arising bourgeois nationalists and reformers for whom a socialistic or even
from differences of class, race, caste, creed and sex.” But the program did Marxist colouration was a necessary means of approaching the masses.
not identify the LSSP as a party of the working class nor did it elaborate a 3-10. It was a measure of the extreme class tensions at the time in Sri
revolutionary program for achieving socialism. It made no attempt to Lanka and internationally that those who were thrust into the LSSP
address any of the issues confronting the international working class, leadership were the most audacious and revolutionary elements oriented
above all, the emergence of Stalinism and its betrayals. to the working class—the so-called Trotskyist-group or T-group. Colvin R.
3-6. The emergence of the LSSP as a radical, anti-colonial party de Silva became the LSSP’s first president and Leslie Goonewardene its
oriented to the toilers was a product of the economic backwardness of the first secretary. Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera were elected to the
Sri Lankan capitalist class and its political servility to British colonial State Council in February 1936 and used their position to emphatically
rule. Even compared to the local capitalists in India who were prominent declare the LSSP’s opposition to any support for Britain in the looming
in the textile, jute, coal and steel industries, their counterparts in Sri Lanka world war. The LSSP gained support in the Colombo working class
played a minor economic role. The tea plantations—the dominant and most through its determined defence of basic rights and conditions in the teeth
profitable industry—were British-owned. The main transport of violent opposition by Goonesinha and his union apparatus. The failure
infrastructure—the docks and railways—had been built by British capital. of bourgeois parties to advocate, let alone fight for, even limited social
The Sri Lankan bourgeoisie filled the less profitable gaps in the colonial reforms or democratic rights, including freedom from colonial rule, meant
economy—accumulating capital through their employment as servants of that those tasks fell to the emerging representatives of the proletariat. The
the colonial state, the farming of liquor rents, and their ownership of LSSP campaigned for and won a series of partial reforms, including
rubber and coconut estates and graphite mines. changes to the oppressive village headman system, the use of local
3-7. Politics followed economics. The Ceylon National Congress (CNC) languages in the courts and unemployment relief.
formed in 1919 was a pale reflection of the Indian National Congress 3-11. In 1937, the LSSP sponsored a tour by prominent Congress
(INC) established by the Indian bourgeoisie in 1885. Whereas the INC Socialist Party leader Kamaladevi Chattopadyaya from India, who
called for self-government as early as 1907 and in the aftermath of World addressed a rally of 35,000 people at Galle Face Green in Colombo. A
War I launched mass campaigns for self-rule, the CNC was capable only young Australian, Mark Bracegirdle, a planter’s apprentice who had
of the most timid appeals for constitutional change. The CNC had far joined the LSSP, spoke alongside her in the plantation areas, denouncing
more in common with the backward-looking communal organisations of the exploitation of tea estate workers. The colonial administration’s

attempt to deport Bracegirdle turned into a David and Goliath
confrontation with the LSSP that electrified the island. In the face of
overwhelming public opposition, a censure of the governor in the State
Council and a Supreme Court order against the deportation, the colonial
authorities were compelled to retreat, greatly enhancing the LSSP’s
political stature.
3-12. However, the most fundamental issues facing the LSSP were
bound up with international events. From its founding in 1935, the LSSP
had taken no public stand on the life-and-death political struggle being
waged by Trotsky and his co-thinkers against Stalinism and for the
building of the Fourth International. Its only international affiliation was
with the Congress Socialist Party in India, formed in 1934 as a loose
socialistic faction within the INC. However, between 1935 and 1939, the
LSSP leadership was increasingly driven into conflict with the Stalinist
Third International and was compelled to grapple with the decisive
international issues of the period. The so-called T-group was deeply
disturbed by the Popular Front politics advocated by Stalin that resulted in
devastating defeats in the 1930s of the semi-insurrectionary French strike
movement and the Spanish revolution. The “Popular Front” was the
diametrical opposite of the United Front that Trotsky had advocated in
Germany. In the name of the fight against fascism and the defence of
democracy, it involved a common political platform with opportunist and
openly bourgeois parties that shackled the working class to the
bourgeoisie, private property and the state, and blocked its independent
revolutionary activity. As part of the Popular Front policy and its
manoeuvres with the “democratic” powers of France and Britain, the
Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the Third International’s previous
support for full independence for the colonies of those countries; and, in
doing so, betrayed the developing anti-colonial revolution.
3-13. Privately the LSSP leadership was hostile to the monstrous
Moscow Show Trials of 1936–1938 that were targeted at the Trotskyist
movement but also served as the pretext for the systematic murder of
hundreds of thousands of socialists, including Bolshevik leaders, Red
Army commanders, scientists and artists—the finest representatives of the
generation that had carried out the Russian Revolution. The LSSP leaders
were also strongly influenced by Trotsky’s profound analysis of Stalinism
in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It
Going?, which first became available in English in 1938. It was, however,
the outbreak of World War II that proved decisive in the LSSP’s turn to
Trotskyism and the establishment of a section of the Fourth International
in India and Sri Lanka.
To be continued
Footnotes:
1. Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution (London: New Park
Publications, 1971) pp. 154–55.
2. Leon Trotsky, “The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade
Stalin” in Leon Trotsky on China (New York: Monad Press, 1976) p. 161.
To contact the WSWS and the

Socialist Equality Party visit:
http://www.wsws.org


Lanka)—Part 2
27 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and from fascism. All the classes and peoples must rally around the
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) ‘peaceful’, ‘democratic’ governments so as to repel fascist aggressors.
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in The ‘democracy’ will be saved and peace stabilised forever. This gospel
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts. rests on a deliberate lie. If the British government were really concerned
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 with the flowering of democracy then a very simple opportunity to
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 demonstrate this exists: let the government give complete freedom to
India.”[6] While not minimising the danger of fascism, Trotsky insisted
4. The LSSP’s turn to the Fourth International that the main enemy of oppressed classes and peoples was at home. In
4-1. The Fourth International was founded at a secret meeting held in India, that meant British imperialism whose overthrow would deliver a
Paris in September 1938 of 30 delegates from 11 countries. Although massive blow to all oppressors, including the fascist dictators.
unable to send delegates, three Asian parties—in China, French Indochina, 4-4. Trotsky was scathing in his appraisal of the Indian bourgeoisie:
and Australia—affiliated as sections of the Fourth International. The “They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism.
Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses.
the Fourth International written by Trotsky and adopted at the conference They seek compromises with British imperialism no matter what the
declared: “All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet price, and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above. The
‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false
deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have prophet! Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s
not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a position will constantly improve, that her liberties will continue to be
socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe enlarged, and that India will gradually become a Dominion on the road of
threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn now is to the proletariat, peaceful reforms. Later on, perhaps even achieve independence. The
i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind entire perspective is false to the core.”[7]
is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”[3] The program 4-5. Turning to the role of Stalinism, Trotsky explained that as in other
outlined “a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s countries, the Soviet bureaucracy subordinated the interests of the Indian
conditions and today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class masses to its diplomatic manoeuvres with the “democratic
and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by powers”—advocating the right to self-determination for peoples under
the proletariat.”[4] The transitional demands were to develop the fascist domination, but continued subjugation for the colonies of Britain,
revolutionary initiative and consciousness of the working class, not to France and America. To wage a struggle against British imperialism and
water down the program to the existing consciousness of workers. the approaching war meant a complete break with Stalinism. That was
4-2. The founding document succinctly summed up the perspective of precisely the issue that confronted the LSSP leaders who turned towards
Permanent Revolution based on the combined and uneven development of the Fourth International. Selina Perera was sent to Britain and the United
capitalism: “Colonial and semicolonial countries are backward countries States in 1939 to make contact with Trotskyist leaders in Europe and
by their very essence. But backward countries are part of a world North America and, though the attempt failed, to meet with Trotsky.
dominated by imperialism. Their development, therefore, has a combined 4-6. In December 1939, the Trotskyist faction threw down the gauntlet
character: the most primitive economic forms are combined with the last to supporters of Stalinism within the LSSP by moving the following
word in capitalist technique and culture. In like manner are defined the motion in the LSSP’s Executive Committee: “Since the Third
political strivings of the proletariat in the backward countries: the struggle International has not acted in the interests of the international
for the most elementary achievements of national independence and revolutionary working class movement, while expressing its solidarity
bourgeois democracy is combined with the socialist struggle against with the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state, the Lanka Sama Samaja
world imperialism. Democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the Party declares that it has no faith in the Third International.” The motion
problems of socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical was passed 29 to 5. The Stalinists and their supporters broke from the
epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.”[5] party, forming the United Socialist Party in November 1940 and then the
4-3. In a letter to Indian workers in July 1939, Trotsky further Ceylon Communist Party in July 1943.
elaborated on the political issues they faced in the impending war. 4-7. Leslie Goonewardene wrote a critique of Stalinism entitled: “The
“Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war Third International Condemned,” in which he highlighted the opportunist
will be waged for the principles of ‘democracy’ which must be saved shifts of the Communist parties in Britain and France in 1939 from

support for the imperialist war to opposition to it. He pointed out that the lead towards bloodshed and rioting … with undoubted repercussions of the
wild political swings were dictated by the about-face in the Kremlin from utmost seriousness in India.” Police unleashed a reign of terror throughout
unprincipled manoeuvres with the “democratic powers”—Britain and the tea estates. On June 18, just days after the fall of Paris to the Nazi
France—to the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in August 1939. He armies, the LSSP was banned and four leaders—Philip Gunawardena,
concluded: “The Second International betrayed the working class in the N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva and Edmund Samarakkody—were
war of 1914–18. Today the Third International, by subordinating the arrested. The party had already made preparations for illegality and
international revolutionary movement to Soviet Union foreign policy, is continued to function in Sri Lanka throughout the war, despite the
committing another betrayal. It is our duty to point out this fact.”[8] imposition of martial law.
4-8. The breakaway by the Stalinists and the LSSP’s turn to the Fourth 5-2. In May 1940, the LSSP began sending members to India to contact
International marked a decisive shift in its class axis and the political groups of Trotskyist sympathisers and lay the groundwork for an all-India
reorientation of the party on the basis of the Theory of Permanent party. The LSSP gained the support of three groupings—in Calcutta led by
Revolution. Above all, the LSSP leaders recognised that the fight against Ajit Kumar Mukherji Roy and Kamalesh Banerji; in the industrial city of
imperialist oppression and for socialism in Sri Lanka was indissolubly Kanpur led by Onkarnath Verma Shastri; and in Bombay led by
bound up with struggles of the working class in India and internationally. Chandravadan Shukla. Both Shastri and Shukla had been members of the
In a farsighted step, the LSSP called for the formation of an all-India Communist Party of India (CPI) but opposed the turn to Popular Frontism
party as a section of the Fourth International to integrate the struggles of and broke from the party in the late 1930s. Under conditions of illegality,
workers throughout the subcontinent against British imperialism. In the LSSP convened two secret meetings in Kandy in December 1940 and
accordance with this strategic turn, the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India March 1941 to lay the basis for a single Trotskyist party of India, Burma
(BLPI) was founded in 1942. The available histories of the LSSP, and Ceylon. Both meetings were attended by the jailed LSSP leaders, who
reflecting its subsequent degeneration in the 1950s, either ignore the had recruited their jailer. The second involved delegates from India.
experience of the BLPI or treat it as a hopeless adventure in revolutionary Recognising that a politically explosive situation with profound
romanticism. But it was precisely in its break from the radical, nationalist revolutionary implications was developing in India, most LSSP leaders
outlook of Samasamajism and its reorientation on the basis of proletarian moved to the mainland. On April 7 1942, the four LSSP leaders walked
internationalism that the BLPI made an indelible contribution to the out of their Kandy prison, with their jailer, and successfully evaded a
struggle for Marxism in South Asia and internationally that continues to police dragnet to reach India. In May 1942, a meeting of LSSP and Indian
hold crucial political and theoretical lessons for workers and youth today. Trotskyist leaders formally established the Bolshevik Leninist Party of
4-9. With the approach of war, Stalin set out to destroy the India (BLPI), adopted a program and sought affiliation to the Fourth
newly-established Fourth International and, above all, to eliminate International.
Trotsky himself. Stalin feared that the revolutionary convulsions, which 5-3. The founding of the BLPI represented a milestone in the struggle
the war would necessarily produce, would immensely strengthen the for revolutionary Marxism in South Asia. Nothing that they subsequently
Trotskyist movement, including in the Soviet Union, posing a direct did can detract from the achievement of the BLPI leaders in introducing
challenge to the Soviet bureaucracy. Prior to the founding of the Fourth Trotskyism into the Indian subcontinent. In marked contrast to the
International, the GPU, aided by a network of agents planted inside the LSSP’s amorphous 1935 platform with its limited call for socialism in Sri
Trotskyist movement, murdered Erwin Wolf, one of Trotsky’s Lanka, the BLPI’s program was firmly rooted in proletarian
secretaries; Ignace Reiss, a defector from the GPU who declared his internationalism. It was based on the recognition that the struggle against
support for Trotsky; Trotsky’s son and close collaborator Leon Sedov; imperialist oppression and for socialism in Sri Lanka was completely
and Rudolf Klement, secretary of the Fourth International. After a failed bound up with socialist revolution in India and internationally. The
assassination attempt in May 1940, Trotsky was assaulted by GPU agent program made a comprehensive analysis of British rule in India, the
Ramon Mercader on August 20, 1940 in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico, emergence of capitalism, the role of the various classes and of all the
and died the following day. Trotsky’s assassination was the political political parties, and elaborated a series of transitional demands based on
crime of the century and a profound blow to the international working the founding program of the Fourth International.
class. He was the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, the 5-4. The BLPI exposed the politics of compromise of the Indian
irreconcilable opponent of Stalinism, and the last and greatest National Congress, its close connection to the landlords and its betrayal of
representative of the traditions of classical Marxism that had inspired the the mass civil disobedience movements of the early 1920s and 1930s.
mass revolutionary workers’ movement of the late nineteenth and early Turning to Gandhi’s “non-violence”, it explained that through this
twentieth centuries. doctrine “the bourgeoisie have attempted to ensure their control of the
national movement by restricting the form and scope of the struggle and
5. The founding of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India insuring against its moving into revolutionary channels.” The BLPI
5-1. From the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939 between Britain denounced as “flagrant deception” the attempts of the Stalinists to justify
and France, on one side, and Nazi Germany and its allies on the other, the their collaboration with the INC by declaring it to be a multi-class party.
LSSP categorically opposed any support for the war. When CNC leader Congress was, it warned, above all in its political leadership, akin to the
D.S. Senanayake moved a resolution in the State Council giving bourgeois Kuomintang in China that crushed the 1925–27 revolution.
“whole-hearted support” to the British government, Philip Gunawardena 5-5. The close connection of the Indian bourgeoisie to the landlords
denounced the war between the two imperialist camps, declaring: “We meant that Congress was organically incapable of meeting even the most
refuse to be a part of any imperialist war. We are against all imperialist elementary needs of the peasantry. “The leadership of the revolution,
wars and exploitation. The class struggle has refused to stop because a which the peasantry cannot provide for itself, can come only from an
country is at war.”[9] The LSSP played the leading role in a wave of urban class. But the Indian bourgeoisie cannot possibly provide this
strikes among plantation workers that began at the Mooloya Estate in leadership, since in the first place, it is reactionary through and through on
December 1939 where police shot dead a tea factory worker, Govindan. the land question itself, sharing as it does so largely in the parasitic
As the strikes spread, culminating in the formation of a workers’ council exploitation of the peasantry. Above all, the bourgeoisie, on account of its
on the Wewessa Estate in May 1940, prominent planters demanded action inherent weakness and dependence on imperialism itself, is destined to
against the LSSP, warning “that the aggravating situation in Ceylon might play a counter-revolutionary role in the coming struggle for power.”[10]

The BLPI elaborated a series of demands starting with “the abolition of event of it being drawn into the war. The USSR, however, still rested on
landlordism without compensation” and including the slogans “land to the the nationalised property relations established by the Russian Revolution
tillers of the soil” and the “liquidation of agricultural indebtedness” as the despite the impact of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its betrayals. Behind
means for mobilising the peasantry, particularly its most oppressed layers, Burnham’s redefinition of the Soviet Union as “bureaucratic
behind the working class in the struggle for power. collectivism” was the pessimistic conclusion that it represented a new
5-6. The BLPI exposed the role of the CPI, founded in 1920, which had form of society, not foreseen by Marxism, dominated and run by a
been thoroughly corrupted by Stalinism. As it had done in China, the managerial elite. This acceptance of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a
Comintern instructed the CPI in the 1920s to pursue an alliance with the permanent feature of society, rather than a temporary, cancerous
so-called “revolutionary” sections of the bourgeoisie, organised in the excrescence on the workers’ state, flowed from a rejection of the
Indian National Congress. With a view to prodding Congress to the left, revolutionary role of the working class and the nature of the imperialist
the CPI was further directed to focus its energies on building “dual class” epoch as the death agony of capitalism. The arguments advanced by
worker and peasant parties with a bourgeois-democratic program, thereby Burnham and Shachtman were to foreshadow a long line of attacks on
further eroding its class independence and rendering it incapable of boldly Marxism that emerged after World War II. While their conclusions varied,
fighting for the leadership of the working class. In the early 1930s, all of these revisionist groupings—whether in the form of various theories
following the Third Period line, the CPI coupled continued advocacy of of “state capitalism” or Michel Pablo’s “centuries of deformed workers’
the Stalinist-Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution with rhetorical states”—regarded the Stalinist regimes as having historical validity and
denunciations of the Indian National Congress. It stood aloof from the wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force.
second mass civil disobedience movement, refusing to directly challenge To be continued
the Congress leadership. With the turn to the Popular Front in the Footnotes:
mid-1930s, the CPI even more openly and crudely promoted the INC as 3. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
the protagonist of the struggle against British rule, even as Congress (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977) p. 112.
accepted the 1935 constitutional reforms and became a partner in colonial 4. Emphasis in the original; ibid, p. 114.
rule by forming ministries in a majority of the provinces of British India. 5. Emphasis in the original; ibid, p. 137.
The latter part of the 1930s saw a militant upsurge of the working class 6. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–40) (New York: Pathfinder Press,
that came into open conflict with the Congress ministries, and a wave of 2001) pp. 29–30.
peasant struggles, including the rapid growth of Kisan Sabhas (peasant 7. Ibid, pp. 30-31.
associations). The Stalinists strove to harness these movements to the 8. Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism in Ceylon the Lanka Sama
INC, constraining the struggles of the working class to economic demands Samaja Party, 1935–1964 (London: Porcupine Press: Socialist Platform,
and dropping the call for the abolition of the zamindari landlord system 1997) pp. 64–67.
for fear it would lead to a confrontation with the Congress leadership. 9. Quoted in George Jan Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon: a
5-7. After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939, the CPI documentary history of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, 1935–1942
shifted from support for the “democratic” powers against fascism to (Stanford: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 1968) p.
opposition to the war. In another about-face following the Nazi invasion 206.
of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the CPI gave its full support to Britain 10. Charles Wesley Ervin, Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement
and acted as the chief strike-breaker and advocate of the imperialist war in in India and Ceylon, 1935–48 (Colombo: Social Scientists Association,
the working class. Summing up the CPI’s treachery, the BLPI declared: 2006) p. 300.
“Today, this attitude is the most shameful and callous of all, since in 11. Ibid., Appendix B, p. 304.
servile obedience to the counterrevolutionary Kremlin clique, they are 12. Ibid., p. 305.
openly advocating unconditional and active support of the imperialist war.
With its false theory of the National Front, the CPI is making ready to
repeat the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution by handing over the To contact the WSWS and the
leadership of the revolutionary struggle to the treacherous bourgeoisie. Socialist Equality Party visit:
The Communist Party of India, because of the prestige it seeks to obtain
from the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, is today the most
dangerous influence within the working class of India.[11]
5-8. Turning to the Congress Socialist Party, the BLPI declared that it
had “from the beginning followed a policy of utter subservience to the
Congress bourgeoisie, and remains today completely without a base
within the working class. Surrendering its claim to an independent
existence, the CSP has been split wide open by the Communists who
worked within it, and is today an empty shell, devoid of political
substance.” It insisted that only the BLPI, “with its revolutionary strategy
based on the accumulated experience of history and the theory of
Permanent Revolution in particular, can lead the working class to
revolutionary victory.”[12]
5-9. The BLPI firmly supported the Fourth International’s defence of
the Soviet Union against imperialist intrigue and attack. On the outbreak
of World War II, Trotsky had waged a political struggle against a faction
inside the American section, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led by
Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern, who argued that the
Soviet Union could no longer be considered a degenerated workers’ state
and that the Fourth International should not call for its defence in the


Lanka)—Part 3
28 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and Congress leaders including Gandhi in jail, the Congress Socialists
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) assumed the leadership of the movement, but had no perspective for
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in taking power. They made no orientation to the working class and instead
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts. indulged in futile acts of sabotage and peasant guerrillaism. The BLPI
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 threw itself into the protests, turning to sections of workers and students,
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 and participating in or organising demonstrations in Bombay, Calcutta,
Madras and other cities. It paid a heavy price. Assisted by the Stalinists,
6. The Quit India movement who branded the BLPI as “criminals and gangsters who help the
6-1. The BLPI’s anticipation of a political upheaval in India proved Fascists”, the police arrested many BLPI members and senior leaders. The
correct. Within months of its formation, the tumultuous Quit India Quit India movement involved millions of people and continued for
movement erupted in August 1942. Congress had formally opposed the months in the face of brutal police repression. According to official
war and its ministers had resigned their posts in the autumn of 1939, but figures, more than 1,000 were killed and 60,000 were imprisoned during
its opposition had been limited to token individual civil disobedience. the period from August 1942 to March 1943. After the movement ebbed
Following the outbreak of war in the Pacific, Gandhi and the Congress and the British turned back the Japanese army, Congress effectively
leaders calculated that the imminent danger of a Japanese invasion of shelved its Quit India demand for the remainder of the war.
India gave them greater leverage with the British. Under conditions of 6-4. The BLPI’s tenacious struggle enhanced the stature of Trotskyism
mounting socio-economic dislocation caused by India’s subordination to throughout the region. Under difficult conditions of illegality, police
the British war effort, Congress sought to pre-empt the emergence of persecution and wartime isolation from the Fourth International, it had
mass unrest. On August 7, the Congress Working Committee deliberated oriented to the Quit India movement, above all to the working class,
before huge crowds at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, a large open area in without making the slightest political concession to Congress or the
central Bombay, on a resolution that called for mass non-violent struggle Congress Socialists. However, as the revolutionary wave ebbed, sharp
for “orderly British withdrawal.” In what became a major political blow political differences emerged inside the BLPI. The genesis of these
to the CPI, the Stalinist members of the Working Committee publicly differences lay in the transformation of the LSSP into the BLPI—a
opposed the resolution. transformation that had involved a fundamental shift on to a new
6-2. The BLPI circulated its leaflets at the Bombay meeting, supporting proletarian-internationalist axis and inevitably generated internal tensions.
any anti-imperialist struggle that Congress launched and calling for “a The initial disputes revolved around Philip Gunawardena’s hostility to
mass general political strike against British imperialism”, backed by rural Doric de Souza’s efforts to refashion the BLPI in Sri Lanka as a Leninist
no-tax and no-rent campaigns leading up to the seizure of land by peasant party. From Bombay, Gunawardena denounced the “petty bourgeois
committees. In doing so, the BLPI was following the advice contained in intellectuals” in Colombo who had turned the party into “a narrow
Trotsky’s letter to Indian workers: “In the event that the Indian conspiratorial sect entirely cut off from the masses.” In 1942, he and
bourgeoisie finds itself compelled to take even the tiniest step on the road N.M. Perera formed a Workers Opposition faction that gathered a layer of
of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain, the proletariat will trade unionists. De Souza, who led the BLPI’s underground work in Sri
naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own Lanka during the war, responded by forming a Bolshevik Leninist faction.
methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations, and more 6-5. While these factional differences were at first unclear, the end of
decisive combat actions, depending on the relationship of forces and the the Quit India movement brought more fundamental disagreements to
circumstances. Precisely to do this must the proletariat have its hands free. light. Impatient with the size and development of the BLPI, Philip
Complete independence from the bourgeoisie is indispensable to the Gunawardena and N.M. Perera issued a document from jail in 1943
proletariat, above all in order to exert influence on the peasantry, the entitled “The Indian Struggle—The Next Phase” that argued for an
predominant mass of India’s population.”[13] unprincipled fusion with various petty bourgeois formations, including the
6-3. Despite his rousing “Do or Die!” speech on August 8, Gandhi’s Congress Socialist Party, in a vaguely defined “United Revolutionary
expectation was that the resolution would force the viceroy to open talks. Front.” The scheme was a marked retreat towards the Samasamajist
However, the British responded by detaining the entire Congress tradition with which the BLPI had broken. At its 1944 congress in
leadership—a move that unleashed a wave of angry protests and strikes in Madras, the BLPI emphatically rejected the Gunawardena-Perera
many parts of the country. The Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha document. The adopted resolution declared: “This proposal, we believe, if
joined the CPI in supporting the suppression of the protests. With top carried out, can only result in the dissolution of the only party (however

small it may be) existing in India today with a clear-cut revolutionary US imperialism in Asia.
program, and the creation in its place at the best of a broad centrist 7-3. The role of Stalinism in betraying the anti-colonial movements in
party.”[14] The dispute, however, remained unresolved and was a Asia was also vital to the global restabilisation of capitalism. The end of
harbinger of the political issues that were to emerge with great force the war generated an anti-imperialist movement of the masses throughout
following the end of the war. the region of unparalleled scope and intensity. The crushing Japanese
6-6. The main resolution at the BLPI congress made a detailed analysis defeat of the old European powers during the conflict had shattered the
of the reasons for the defeat of the Quit India movement. “The basic basis for their Asiatic empires. In every case, whether that of the French
reason for the August movement not outstripping in any significant in Indo-China, the Dutch in Indonesia or the British in Malaya and the
manner the bounds of the bourgeois perspectives was the failure of the Indian subcontinent, the attempt by the former colonial rulers to resume
working class to move into militant class action on a decisive scale,” it control of their possessions met with mass opposition. In China and
stated. While workers had been sympathetic to the protests and had Korea, the collapse of Japanese rule gave rise to broad movements against
engaged in sporadic strikes, the working class had been held back by the the dictatorial regimes that US imperialism sought to install.
CPI, through its control of the trade union apparatus, and the Congress 7-4. In War and the Fourth International written in 1934, Trotsky had
Socialists, whose orientation was to the peasantry. The resolution laid the paid special attention to the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the
basis for deepening the party’s intervention into the working class, East, explaining: “Their struggle is doubly progressive: tearing the
particularly after the end of the war. backward peoples from Asiatism, sectionalism and foreign bondage, they
strike powerful blows at the imperialist states. But it must be clearly
7. Stalinism betrays post-war revolutionary upheavals understood beforehand that the belated revolutions in Asia and Africa are
7-1. Trotsky’s prognosis that the bloody horrors and deprivations of the incapable of opening up a new epoch of renaissance for the national state.
war would bring a post-war revolutionary upsurge was vindicated The liberation of the colonies will be merely a gigantic episode in the
throughout Asia. The massacres carried out by Japanese imperialism in world socialist revolution, just as the belated democratic overturn in
China, Korea and other countries under its domination were paralleled by Russia, which was also a semi-colonial country, was only the introduction
the criminal manner in which US imperialism brought the war to an end. to the socialist revolution.” Thus the democratic tasks of the post-war
The intense American bombing of Japanese cities, including the extensive anti-colonial struggles could only be achieved under the leadership of the
use of incendiary devices designed to maximise civilian casualties, working class as part of the broader struggle for socialism internationally:
culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but that road was blocked by Stalinism.
in August 1945. The chief aim of these last two atrocities was to 7-5. Throughout South East Asia, the Stalinist parties were instrumental
demonstrate the devastating power of the new weapon to the Soviet Union in derailing the post-war anti-colonial struggles with far-reaching
and to bring the war in the Pacific to an abrupt halt as the Soviet armies consequences for which the working class and oppressed masses are still
advanced rapidly into China and Korea. Six years of imperialist paying. None of the states established in the region after World War II has
barbarism, following the acute hardships of the Great Depression, had been able to meet the aspirations of working people for basic democratic
exposed capitalism before the eyes of humanity. The efforts of the rights and a decent standard of living. In Indonesia, the Indonesian
discredited ruling classes to reassert their control provoked determined Communist Party (PKI) subordinated the working class to the nationalist
opposition from the working class and revolutionary upheavals movement led by Sukarno even as he manoeuvred first with the Dutch,
internationally. then the US. In return for Washington’s support for independence,
7-2. As the Transitional Program explained, the central issue was Sukarno carried out a bloody crackdown on the PKI in 1948 in which
revolutionary leadership. While the Trotskyists had fought courageously thousands of PKI members were killed. That did not stop the PKI from
to unify and mobilise the working class against the war, the Fourth renewing its alliance with Sukarno paving the way for the CIA-backed
International had been seriously weakened by the sheer scale of the military coup of 1965–66 that resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000
repression against its sections—by the so-called democratic powers, the PKI members, workers and peasants, and three decades of dictatorship. In
fascists and the Stalinists. Moreover, the Soviet bureaucracy emerged Malaya, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its Malayan People’s
from the war with its prestige enhanced by the Red Army’s victories over Anti-Japanese Army openly welcomed the return of British forces and
the Nazi armies. Stalin, however, was terrified that successful revolutions collaborated with the new British administration as it sought to
in the West would give an impetus to a movement of the Soviet working re-establish itself. Having consolidated its control by 1948, Britain turned
class against his regime. He struck a series of deals with Roosevelt and on the MCP and over the next decade ruthlessly crushed its guerrilla
Churchill at Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July forces before handing over power to the conservative Malay communal
1945) to help preserve capitalism in return for a limited Soviet sphere of party—the United Malays National Organisation—that has dominated
influence in Eastern Europe. In France and Italy, where the bourgeois Malaysia ever since. The MCP’s support for Lee Kuan Yew and his
parties were thoroughly compromised by their connivance and outright People’s Action Party laid the basis for the present-day one-party police
collaboration with the fascists, the Communist parties, following state in Singapore.
Moscow’s directives, disarmed resistance fighters, joined capitalist 7-6. The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) led by Ho Chi Minh
governments as ministers and suppressed any independent activity by the played an especially criminal role in assisting France to re-establish
working class. As part of the capitalist government in France, the French control over their colonies. Following the Japanese surrender in August
Communist Party supported the efforts of French imperialism to regain 1945, the Stalinists formed a provisional government with bourgeois
control over its colonies, including Algeria and Indochina. In Japan, the parties and sought to barter with the British and French as their military
Communist Party played a no less treacherous role in containing a huge forces landed. The Trotskyists of the La Lutte group and the League of
upsurge of the working class. Based on a bizarre version of the Stalinist International Communists fought for the independent mobilisation of the
two-stage theory, the Japanese Communist Party claimed that the working class and urban and rural poor amid a burgeoning movement for
American occupation forces were carrying out the “democratic national independence. Mass demonstrations erupted in Saigon, peoples’
revolution” and, on this basis, subordinated the strike movement of the committees began to mushroom and a provisional central committee was
working class to the dictates of General Douglas MacArthur. As a result, established. As tensions sharpened in September 1945, the Stalinists
capitalist rule was salvaged and Japan transformed into a crucial ally of disarmed the peoples’ committees, suppressed the provisional central

committee and murdered scores of Trotskyists, including La serious support
Lutte from the proletariat. This isleader
precisely the situation in
Ta Thu Thau. Far from securing independence, the ICP’s collaboration China. This acts to augment to an extreme the danger of conflicts between
with the French only helped restore colonial rule in the south. The the workers and armed peasants.”[16]
Vietnamese people were to pay a horrific price for the betrayal of the 8-4. The CCP, following the line dictated from Moscow, formed a
post-war revolutionary upsurge and the subsequent manoeuvring of the Popular Front alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime against the
Stalinists with French and then American imperialism. Thirty years of war Japanese armies that invaded China in 1937. Trotsky insisted that the war
left the country devastated and millions dead. by China, an oppressed nation, against Japanese imperialism had a
7-7. The Stalinist betrayals in Europe and Asia enabled the United progressive content and opposed sectarian tendencies that branded his
States, which emerged from the war as the dominant imperialist power, to stance as “social patriotism” and “a capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek.” He
implement a series of initiatives to stabilise the world capitalist economy. stressed, however, that in supporting the war the working class had to
The Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as a stable global retain its political independence. Instead, in forging an alliance with the
currency by pegging it against gold at a fixed rate; the General Agreement Kuomintang, the CCP subordinated the interests of the masses to the
on Tariffs and Trade aimed to expand trade and prevent a return to the bourgeoisie—renouncing its own land reform program and explicitly
disastrous protectionist policies of the 1930s; and the US provided abandoning the interests of workers so as not to offend the KMT
substantial aid to rebuild the shattered economies of Western Europe and landlords and capitalists. Following the Japanese defeat, the CCP, in line
Japan. Having gained a measure of capitalist stability, US imperialism with Stalin’s policy of collaboration with bourgeois parties and
launched its “Cold War” counteroffensive against “Communism.” The governments in Europe and Asia, sought to continue its wartime alliance
opening shots were US support for right-wing regimes in Greece and with the KMT.
Turkey, and the launching of the Marshall Plan that transformed Western 8-5. Despite obvious signs that Chiang Kai-shek, with US backing, was
Europe into an anti-Soviet bloc, but these soon extended into a global preparing for war against the CCP, it was not until October 1947, as the
confrontation. The US responded to the 1949 revolution in China with a Cold War was emerging, that Mao finally called for the overthrow of the
massive military intervention in Korea to prop up its right-wing dictatorial KMT regime. Facing the prospect of military annihilation at the hands of
regime in Seoul. The 1950–53 Korean War cost the lives of millions and a KMT offensive in Manchuria, the CCP revived its policy of land reform
left the peninsula permanently divided and scarred. in order to exploit the widespread ferment among the peasantry. Chiang
Kai-shek’s subsequent defeat had less to do with Mao’s supposed
8. The Chinese Revolution strategic genius, than the inherent weakness of the thoroughly corrupt and
8-1. In China, the political difficulties confronting the working class in oppressive KMT regime, which lacked any significant political base, was
the immediate post-war period were presented very starkly. In the wake of besieged by financial crisis and confronted an immense revolutionary
the defeat of the 1925–27 revolution, the Chinese Communist Party upheaval of the working class and peasantry. Mao’s armies defeated the
(CCP) retreated to the rural hinterland and increasingly based itself on the KMT troops in Manchuria with the help of captured Japanese weapons
peasantry. While retaining its links with the Third International and the handed over by the Soviet army and encountered no major military
Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the CCP’s turn to the peasantry resistance as they swept south. The People’s Republic of China was
shifted the party’s class axis away from the proletariat. The CCP’s proclaimed in October 1949.
Stalinist ideology based on the two-stage theory and class collaboration 8-6. The CCP modelled its new regime on the “bloc of four classes” by
with the national bourgeoisie was also infused with peasant populism and including elements of the bourgeoisie who had not fled to Taiwan and by
the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare. Mao Zedong, who had always initially limiting the extent of land reform and the nationalisation of
been on the right-wing of the party, assumed leadership of the CCP in industry. However, such was the extent of the revolutionary movement
1935 and accentuated the party’s orientation towards the peasantry. The and the popular expectations of the CCP, which many identified, falsely,
Chinese Left Opposition, which formed after 1927, remained in the urban with the heritage of the Russian Revolution, that the Stalinists were
centres and oriented to the working class despite widespread repression compelled to go further than they intended. Confronted with the danger of
by the Kuomintang, which was aided by the Stalinists. imperialist intervention as a result of the Korean War, the regime was
8-2. In a farsighted letter to Chinese supporters in 1932, Trotsky warned forced to make concessions to workers and peasants as it mobilised the
of the dangers that the working class could face from Mao’s peasant population for war. In rural areas, the expropriation of the landlord class
armies. Explaining the fundamentally different class orientation of the was completed. As part of its “three anti” and “five anti” campaigns in
peasantry, Trotsky wrote: “The peasant movement is a mighty 1951–52, the CCP targeted industrialists and merchants for their
revolutionary factor insofar as it is directed against the large landowners, “corrupting influence” on the party and the state. In 1953, the first
militarists, feudalists and usurers. But in the peasant movement itself are five-year plan was drawn up and subsequently most remaining private
very powerful proprietary and reactionary tendencies and at a certain businesses were nationalised. None of the complex economic and social
stage it can become hostile to the workers and sustain that hostility problems facing the government, however, could be resolved on the basis
already equipped with arms. He who forgets about the dual nature of the of the reactionary Stalinist theory of “Socialism in One Country.” The
peasantry is not a Marxist. The advanced workers must be taught to CCP created a series of disasters as it lurched from one pragmatic,
distinguish from among ‘communist’ labels and banners the actual social nationalist policy to the next—including a devastating famine in the late
processes.”[15] 1950s produced by the “Great Leap Forward.”
8-3. Trotsky further explained: “The true Communist Party is the 8-7. The bureaucratic CCP regime acted at every point as a brake on the
organisation of the proletarian vanguard. But we must not forget that the revolutionary movement of the masses, especially the working class. As
working class of China has been kept in an oppressed and amorphous Mao’s troops entered the cities and towns in 1949, the CCP imposed
condition during the last four years, and only recently has it evinced signs severe restrictions on any activity by workers. Strikes were suppressed by
of revival. It is one thing when a Communist Party, firmly resting on the force with instances of workers being gunned down by troops or arrested
flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a and executed. The CCP’s organic hostility to the independent political
peasant war. It is altogether another thing when a few thousand or even mobilisation of the proletariat found its highest expression in the ruthless
tens of thousands of revolutionists, who are truly communists or only take crackdown on Chinese Trotskyists, which began in 1949 and continued
the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having any down to the mass detentions of 1952.

8-8. In the international arena, the CCP continued its alliance with the
Soviet Union and relied heavily on Soviet experts and aid in the 1950s to
expand the economy, particularly to develop heavy industry. The CCP’s
economic management of nationalised industries was closely modelled on
Stalinist bureaucratic planning in the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split
in 1962 reflected the competing national interests of the two Stalinist
bureaucracies. The Soviet Union backed India against China in the 1962
Sino-Indian border war. The CCP, which was critical of Khrushchev’s
exposure of Stalin’s crimes in his 1956 secret speech, never broke with
the basic conceptions of Stalinism and continued to defend all of its
betrayals. The CCP’s advocacy of the two-stage theory and an alliance
with the bourgeoisie in backward countries produced catastrophes for the
masses of Asia, including the bloody 1965–66 Indonesian coup.
To be continued
Footnotes:
13. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–40), pp. 31–32.
14. Quoted in Tomorrow is Ours, p. 171.
15. Leon Trotsky on China, p. 528.
16. Ibid., p. 525.



Lanka)—Part 4
29 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and Hindu Mahasabhites into its ranks.
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 9-3. The post-war anti-imperialist upsurge initially took the form of
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in opposition to the brutal repression of the Quit India movement and the
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts. trials of leaders of the Indian National Army (INA). INA leader Subhas
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Chandra Bose, a militant Congress leader, had opposed Gandhi, but
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 sought to fight British rule not by turning to the working class, but to a
rival imperialist power. He agreed to head the INA, formed from Indian
9. The partition of India soldiers who had been captured by the Japanese army, and to fight against
9-1. In India, Congress, with the support of the Stalinist CPI, played the the British under Japanese leadership. Despite their misguided aims, the
central role in aborting the mass anti-imperialist movement that emerged INA leaders were widely regarded as heroes and patriots, and protests
immediately after the war and in restabilising capitalist rule across South calling for clemency began to mushroom across India, in the process
Asia. Terrified that a renewed Quit India movement would slip out of unifying Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. In November 1945 and again in
their control and increasingly apprehensive before a rising tide of working February 1946, the BLPI was closely involved with student organisations
class and peasant struggles and growing unrest in the princely states, the in leading mass demonstrations in Calcutta against the INA trials. The
Congress leadership moved as quickly as possible to reach a settlement protests were violently suppressed by police and troops, while the CPI
with Britain, which had already recognised the unviability of clinging on joined hands with the Congress to disperse the crowds in the name of the
to its Indian empire. In doing so, Congress jettisoned key aspects of its struggle against indiscipline and disorder.
own program and sought a deal not only with the British but also with the 9-4. In February 1946, sections of the Indian navy in Bombay and
communal parties—the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha—and with Karachi mutinied over pay and conditions, while raising a series of radical
the zamindari landlords and the princes, who formed the conservative political demands, including the release of all political prisoners, the
base of the colonial state. withdrawal of British Indian troops from Indonesia and the slogan of
9-2. The Muslim League, which represented the interests of the Muslim “Quit India.” Their action triggered displays of solidarity and mutinies in
landlords and capitalists in India had put forward its demand for a other Indian military units and ultimately gave rise to mass worker actions
separate Pakistan comprising the Muslim majority provinces in 1940. The and street fighting in Bombay. The Congress and Muslim League fully
Muslim elites, whom the British had organised and cultivated as a supported the British use of force in putting down the rebellion. Gandhi
separate political force through the use of communal categories as a key was especially virulent in his denunciations of the Royal Indian Navy
instrument of their imperial rule, feared both their marginalisation within mutineers and the cross-communal unity that characterised their struggle,
a unified Indian state and growing social unrest. The demand for a saying he “would rather perish in the flames” than see the triumph of “the
separate Muslim state was the means for the Muslim elite to stake its rabble” and declaring that a “combination between Hindus and Muslims
claim to a substantial share of political power in the anticipated post-war and others for the purpose of violent action is unholy.” While the BLPI
reorganisation of South Asia and to whip up communalism so as to divert spearheaded calls for protests and a general strike in support of the
and divide the increasingly restless masses. The Hindu Mahasabha, based mutineers, the Stalinist CPI denounced the “mass hysteria”, and sought to
among sections of the Hindu princes, landlords and big business, justified break up popular support for the mutiny. As on every other occasion that
their own collaboration with the British in communal terms as the means Congress reined in the mass movement, communalism erupted in the
of resisting Muslim “domination.” The Hindu Mahasabhites railed against wake of the mutiny’s defeat. A Muslim League call for “direct action” in
the Congress for “appeasing” the Muslims and argued that Muslims were support of its “Pakistan” demand in August 1946 resulted in violent
alien to the “Hindu nation” and should be denied full citizenship rights. clashes with Hindus in Calcutta that left 6,000 dead and triggered Hindu
The only means of politically combating communalism was through the communal atrocities on Muslims in return.
mobilisation of the workers and rural masses around their common social 9-5. The post-war upsurge also produced a wave of industrial action into
needs. Organically hostile to such a strategy, as it threatened the which the BLPI intervened aggressively and made significant inroads. In
fundamental interests of the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole, Congress June 1946 and again in March–June 1947, the BLPI, which had won the
increasingly adapted to communalism while containing and suppressing leadership of the Madras Labour Union (MLU), led major strikes
social struggles in which the masses implicitly challenged the communal involving the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in Madras, one of the
divide. In the 1945–46 elections, the Congress flirted with an electoral largest factories in India. The 1947 strike was a bitter three-month
pact with the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal and elsewhere welcomed struggle during which mass rallies and a hartal involving more than

100,000 workers and small businesses took place. In June, the union was decades on, none of the burning democratic and social problems of the
declared illegal, its funds seized and leaders arrested, but government masses have been resolved. On the contrary they have grown ever more
attempts to reopen the B & C Mills failed. The MLU eventually called off malignant as landlordism, caste oppression and other feudal vestiges have
the strike but forced management to grant significant concessions. become ever more intertwined with capitalist exploitation.
9-6. The BLPI took a principled stand against communal politics and 9-10. Far from resolving the “communal problem”, partition has greatly
the call for a separate Muslim Pakistan. A resolution at the 1944 BLPI compounded it by enshrining communal divisions in the state structure of
conference declared: “The [Pakistan] slogan is politically reactionary and South Asia. Addressing students in Calcutta following Gandhi’s murder
theoretically false. It is politically reactionary in that it constitutes an in January 1948 by a follower of Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar,
effort through an appeal to communal sentiments to divert rising BLPI leader Colvin R. de Silva explained: “The tragedy of the partition
discontent of the Moslem masses away from its true enemy, namely, flows particularly from the declared objects of its architects. This
British imperialism and its native allies, against the Hindus. It is gruesome cutting up of the living body of India on the one hand and of
theoretically false in that it proceeds from the indefensible contention that two living ‘nationalities’ (the Punjabi and the Bengali nationalities) on
the Moslems in India constitute a Nation, which is declared to be the other was put forward as a solution of the communal problem on the
oppressed (equally false) by a Hindu nation. There is no basis, whether of one side and as a means of opening up the road to freedom on the other.
common historical tradition, language, culture, or race, or in respect of Both pleas have proved false. Partition has proved in the one respect only
geographical and economic factors, for the arising of a distinct Moslem a means for reforging chains for the imperialist enslavement of the masses
nationality. Religion (together, of course, with any common element of ... In the other respect, it has proved but a means of beguiling two states to
culture which that may entail) is the only unifying factor, and is clearly thoughts of mutual war as the only means of canalising internal
insufficient, on the basis of all historical experience, to produce any communal feelings away from civil convulsions. The war by the way may
sentiment which can constitute a national consciousness.”[17] yet come (if indeed, it has not already come in Kashmir and Junagadh).
9-7. Congress, however, was rapidly moving to a settlement with But the civil convulsions have come meanwhile in catastrophic fashion.”
Britain and its princely and landlord allies. While the Congress leadership 9.11. De Silva’s warnings proved prophetic. Partition has given rise to a
exploited its association with the Quit India upheaval to rally support, the reactionary geo-political struggle between India and Pakistan that has
radical turn that the Quit India movement had taken following the arrest resulted in three declared wars and countless war crises, squandered vital
of Gandhi and the other Congress leaders and the growth of post-war economic resources, and today threatens the people of South Asia with a
social struggles made it loathe to lead any popular challenge to British nuclear conflagration. The first Indo-Pak war of 1947–48 resulted in a
rule and determined to get its hands on the colonial state so as to stabilise divided Kashmir that has cruelly split the Kashmiri people and has proven
bourgeois rule as quickly as possible. Consequently, the Congress leaders to be an intractable political problem within the framework of the
abandoned their demand for complete independence and accepted communally-divided subcontinent. Incapable of resolving any of the
Dominion status with continuing ties to Britain. They also gave up their myriad social tensions, the ruling elites in both countries have routinely
call for a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage and sought to resorted to communal demagogy to deflect opposition at home. Partition
prevent a radical challenge to the rule of the princes and landlordism. has facilitated imperialist dominance of South Asia by frustrating rational
Most fundamentally, Congress abandoned its program for a unified, economic development, including the use of water resources, and by
secular India and accepted and implemented the communal partition of providing a political mechanism for the US and other great powers to play
the subcontinent. While the Muslim League pressed for the full inclusion one state and ruling elite against the other. Today South Asia is home to
of Bengal and Punjab in Pakistan, Congress advocated the communal the world’s greatest concentration of poor and is the least economically
division of these two provinces and had no compunction about working integrated region in the world.
with rabid communalist elements, including S.P. Mookerjee, an ex-Hindu
Mahasabha president and future founder of the Jana Sangh (later the 10. Formal independence in Sri Lanka
Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]). The Congress’ campaign to “save” the 10-1. The British decision to grant self-government to Sri Lanka was
Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab and Bengal from Muslim “domination” not the product of any popular campaign waged by the Ceylon National
was a key factor in the unleashing of communal violence during the 1947 Congress. As a result of its pivotal strategic position in the Indian Ocean,
partition in which up to two million people perished and another 12–14 the island became the headquarters for the Allied South East Asian
million were rendered refugees. Command during World War II. D.S Senanayake, as leader of the Board
9-8. This betrayal was aided and abetted by the Stalinist CPI which of Ministers, used the CNC’s fulsome support for the war to haggle
subordinated the anti-colonial movement to the Indian bourgeoisie—firstly behind closed doors for post-war self-government. Senanayake and his
in the form of Congress, then, adapting to the rise of communalism in the colleagues never set their sights higher than Dominion status—that is, a
final years of British rule, also to the Muslim League. The CPI lent junior partner to British imperialism in which London would still
political credibility to the Pakistan slogan, calling it the legitimate determine the island’s overall foreign and defence policies. Senanayake’s
expression of Muslim self-determination, and sent its members into the chief aim in the negotiations was to preserve the political domination of
Muslim League to help it build a social base among the Muslim masses. the Sinhala elites in any settlement. He did not object to Britain’s overall
Between 1945 and 1947, as the Congress and the Muslim League stoked a control of foreign policy, but insisted that Sri Lanka had to be in charge of
communal conflagration, the CPI issued futile calls for the rival bourgeois negotiations with India over the fate of the island’s Tamil speaking
parties to come together and lead the national revolution. plantation workers. When London established the Soulbury Commission
9.9. Partition defined and defines the “freedom” and “independence” in 1944 to map out a new constitution, Senanayake objected to its
incarnated in bourgeois India and Pakistan. The communal pogroms that members holding discussions with the representatives of Tamils and
accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, were only the most bloody Muslims. After the Soulbury Commission recommended limited
and immediately apparent consequence of the abortion of the democratic self-government but delayed even Dominion status, Senanayake and the
revolution. The new states defended the wealth and property of the CNC leaders voted, in September 1945, to accept the report.
zamindars, princes and big business and retained the key institutions and 10-2. The BLPI leaders in Sri Lanka emerged from prison with
laws of the British colonial state, adopting at most a handful of meagre, considerable prestige as the only political figures who had opposed the
piecemeal reforms aimed at facilitating capitalist development. Six war and campaigned for independence. However, the opportunist

orientation elaborated by Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera during the 10-7. The fundamental differences in the class orientation of the BLPI
war quickly manifested itself in an open split in the party. Gunawardena and LSSP were even starker over the issue of “independence” during the
and Perera refused to accept the authority of the BLPI’s regional British handover on February 4, 1948. In a powerful statement entitled
committee in Sri Lanka and formed their own party, using the pre-war “Independence Real or Fake” issued on the day, BLPI leader Colvin R. de
name—the LSSP. The party reverted to the LSSP’s 1941 program for Silva declared that the masses of Ceylon had nothing to rejoice about in
Ceylon and repudiated all documents and decisions made by the BLPI at the “independence” celebrations. “For the new status of their obtaining is
and after its founding in 1942. Gunawardena and Perera opened the doors not ‘independence’ but actually a refashioning of the chains of Ceylon’s
of the LSSP to ex-members and renegades and sought alliances with slavery to British imperialism. It is a continuation of British
various bourgeois formations. The LSSP declared itself “for the Fourth imperialism’s method of exercising that rule ... Only fools would contend
International” but made no effort to seek affiliation. The nationalist that there is ‘no change’ in Ceylon’s ‘status’. There is a change. But the
orientation of the LSSP marked a fundamental break from Trotskyism and essence of this change lies not in any passage of Ceylon from colonial
a return to the pre-war petty bourgeois radicalism of Samasamajism. In a status to the status of independence, but in the change-over of British
1947 statement entitled “The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India: A imperialism in Ceylon from methods of direct rule to methods of indirect
Sectarian Dead-end,” Gunawardena made clear that he regarded the rule.”[20] The BLPI not only voted against the government’s motion on
whole BLPI project and Trotskyism as nothing but a failed romantic independence in the parliament; it organised a mass rally of around
adventure. 50,000 on Galle Face Green in central Colombo in opposition to the
10-3. A resolution of the BLPI Central Committee in India expelling official ceremonies. The LSSP, by contrast, declared “independence” a
Gunawardena and Perera concluded that “the split is no accidental limited step forward, abstained on the vote in parliament and refused to
phenomenon but the clear manifestation of a non-proletarian tendency attend the BLPI rally, which it denounced as “exhibitionism, ultra-leftism
which has developed under the pressure of petty bourgeois forces.... The and adventurism” by “parlour Bolsheviks.”
differences today clearly visible on the plane of organisation, are bound to 10-8. The anti-democratic character of the “independence” settlement
develop on the plane of politics.” A tentative reunification in 1946 rapidly reached between British imperialism and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie
collapsed, underlining the fundamental character of the political became apparent in one of the first actions of the UNP government—its
differences. decision to pass laws that stripped the vast majority of Tamil-speaking
10-4. The BLPI (Ceylon unit) and the LSSP played the leading role in plantation workers of their basic rights as citizens. The BLPI
the militant strike movements that emerged after the war, undermining the unequivocally opposed the anti-democratic legislation. In a speech in
influence of the Communist Party that had used its position as wartime August 1948, Colvin R. de Silva declared that the assumption that “the
strikebreaker for the British to build a trade union apparatus. A general state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race” was “an
strike that erupted in August 1946 with a stoppage by clerical bank outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy.” He continued: “It is
workers, spread to other sections of the working class over the next two precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the
months and compelled the British governor to accede to some of the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state ... If
workers’ economic demands. The strikers also made the political demand this Government approaches this question from the angle of the capitalist
for independence from British rule. The CNC ministers, who were deeply class, our party—we of the Fourth International—approach this question
hostile to any concessions to the working class, violated the terms of the from the angle of the proletariat—the working class. That is to say, we
1946 settlement provoking a second general strike in May–June 1947 that approach it from a class angle independent of racial questions and above
was met with violent repression. Thousands of government and private racial questions. We are not ready as amongst the labouring population of
sector workers were victimised and lost their jobs. The government this country to distinguish between man and man on the ground of his
rammed through a Public Security Bill in the final days of the strike, racial origin. We say a worker is, first and foremost, a worker.”
giving sweeping powers to the police. Significantly, the Tamil elites of the North and East of the island,
10-5. In June 1947, in the wake of the strike, the British government represented by the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), demonstrated
announced that the island would be granted full Dominion status—in line their class allegiance, in opposition to the rights of the Tamil-speaking
with India and Burma. As one historian put it: “At Whitehall, there was a plantation workers, by voting for the bill. An ACTC minority opposed the
clear understanding that Senanayake and the [CNC] moderates were legislation and split to form the Federal Party.
facing increasing pressure from left-wing forces, apart from other critics, 10-9. The BLPI’s far-sighted analysis of the character of the post-war
and that the immediate grant of Dominion status was now an urgent independence settlements, based as it was on Trotsky’s Theory of
necessity as a means of ensuring their political survival.”[18] In the State Permanent Revolution, has stood the test of time. While the United States
Council elections later in 1947, the newly formed United National Party supplanted Britain as the predominant imperialist power, and the
(UNP) established by Senanayake from the CNC and other bourgeois existence of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and
organisations won a plurality and formed a coalition government. The China allowed some room for manoeuvre, the newly “independent”
LSSP and BLPI each won a significant number of seats. bourgeois states in Asia and Africa remained subordinate to imperialism
10-6. The LSSP’s opportunist adaptation to the Sinhala bourgeoisie and the post-war economic framework established by the United States.
became immediately apparent in its manoeuvring to form a ruling The ability of leaders such as India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno,
parliamentary coalition under the leadership of the United National Party Egypt’s Nasser and Tanzania’s Nyerere to posture as “anti-imperialists”
(UNP) politician S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike had headed the or “socialists” depended firstly on uncritical support from the Soviet or
Sinhala Maha Sabha, formed in 1919 to unite the majority Sinhalese on an Chinese Stalinists, and secondly the policies of national economic
explicitly racial and religious basis. In 1939, Colvin R. de Silva warned regulation—import substitution, limited nationalisations and economic
that the Sinhala Maha Sabha was “a dangerously reactionary body” that planning. The illusory character of independence was to become apparent
had the potential to become “a local variant of brown Fascism”[19] The with the end of the post-war boom and the collapse of the Bretton Woods
LSSP’s efforts to back a ruling coalition under Bandaranaike were the system that had sustained national reformist policies. As in India and Sri
first steps in a dangerous trend to dress up Sinhala populism as a Lanka, the national bourgeoisie in country after country has proved
progressive alternative to the UNP. The LSSP’s manoeuvring fell apart incapable of carrying out basic democratic tasks. The borders have
after the BLPI refused to participate in this reactionary charade. remained those that were established by the former colonial rulers, whose

economic interests have continued to be protected, cutting across
pre-existing ethno-linguistic and cultural ties. Within the new states, the
ruling cliques have invariably based themselves on the anti-democratic
dominance of one ethnic, tribal or religious group at the expense of
others.
To be continued
Footnotes:
17. Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, “Resolution on Pakistan,” in New
International, Volume 12, No. 10, December 1946, pp. 300-301,
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol12/no10/blpi.htm.
18. K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1981) p. 460.
19. Britain, World War 2 and the Sama Samajists (Colombo: Young
Socialist Publication, 1996) p. 63.
20. Blows against the Empire, p. 127.



Lanka)—Part 5
30 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and revolutionary perspective would be fought for and close organisational
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) collaboration maintained. Instead a de facto division emerged as most Sri
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in Lankan Trotskyists returned to the island, which became the focus of their
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts. political activities at the expense of the party in India. As the political
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 difficulties created by the post-war restabilisation of capitalism came to
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 bear, the BLPI was liquidated into petty bourgeois radical parties on the
false assumption that entrism and “left unity” offered a means of growing
11. The liquidation of the BLPI quickly.
11-1. The waning of the post-war revolutionary movements and the 11-3. It was the opportunists of the LSSP in Sri Lanka who initiated the
granting of formal independence to Britain’s South Asian colonies push for the BLPI in India to enter into the Socialist Party of India, the
generated enormous political pressures on the BLPI to adapt to the new party formed by the Congress Socialists in 1948 after they split from
national framework and state structures. For layers of the middle classes, Congress. The LSSP’s supporters inside the BLPI in India argued their
“independence” opened up opportunities in the political sphere of “entry tactic” corresponded to the method advocated by Trotsky in the
parliament and careers in the expanding state bureaucracy and 1930s to win over important layers inside the Socialist Party of America
state-owned corporations. The stabilisation of global capitalism and the (SPA) and the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) to the
post-war boom led to rising prices for export commodities and enabled incipient Fourth International. Entry in the 1930s had taken place as a
the bourgeoisie in the former colonies to make concessions, albeit of a brief tactical manoeuvre under conditions in which, due to the rise of
limited character, to the working class. This was especially true in Sri fascism and the betrayals of Stalinism, these social democratic
Lanka where a weak capitalist class confronted a militant proletariat, organisations had become a pole of attraction for workers and young
sections of which were under the BLPI’s revolutionary leadership. people moving toward revolutionary politics. The Trotskyists retained
Temporary economic gains fostered reformist illusions that a socialist significant freedom inside these parties to fight for their revolutionary
revolution was not necessary and that the lot of workers could be internationalist perspective and won over important layers of workers and
improved piecemeal through a combination of parliamentary manoeuvre youth. None of these conditions applied to the Socialist Party of India,
and militant trade union action. which was evolving, not to the left, but along a rightward, nationalist
11-2. Central to the BLPI’s liquidation between 1948 and 1950 was its course to parliamentarism. Although the question of entering the
retreat into nationalism. The opening section of the BLPI’s “Program for Congress Socialists was debated and defeated at the BLPI’s 1947
Ceylon” published in 1946 had argued powerfully that the socialist conference, supporters of the tactic pressed the issue, arguing for
revolution in Ceylon and India were intimately entwined. “Even at its long-term entry into the Socialist Party in the hope of a future
highest point of mobilisation, the revolutionary mass movement in this radicalisation in its ranks. The BLPI ignored the warnings of the
island alone could not, unassisted from outside, generate the energies International Secretariat of the Fourth International in Paris against any
required to overcome the forces which the imperialists would muster in precipitous move and voted, at a special convention in Calcutta in
defence of their power in Ceylon, which is for them not only a field of October 1948, to proceed with entry.
economic exploitation, but a strategic outpost for the defence of the 11-4. Entry into the Socialist Party was a disaster from the outset. BLPI
Empire as a whole … On the other hand, the complete emancipation of members had to apply for membership on an individual basis, could not
India itself is unthinkable while Ceylon is maintained as a solid bastion of form a separate internal faction and could not circulate discussion
British power in the East. From this point of view, we may say that the bulletins. At the same time, the Socialist Party exploited the talents and
revolutionary struggle in Ceylon will be bound up with that on the prestige of former BLPI members to build up their party apparatus,
continent in all its stages, and will constitute a provincial aspect in particularly in cities like Madras where none previously existed. As the
relation to the Indian revolution as a whole.” Despite the BLPI’s critique Socialist Party leadership shifted further to the right, it increasingly
of the partition of India and the independence of Sri Lanka, the party blocked any criticism or debate. In 1952, the former BLPI members
began to draw back from its internationalist perspective and accommodate finally broke away from the Socialist Party, following its poor showing in
to the framework of the newly-formed states. While it was not an issue of the general election of that year and its merger with the bourgeois Kisan
principle that the BLPI in India and Sri Lanka remain organisationally Mazoor Praja Party. By that stage, however, an opportunist current led by
united, the formation of new sections of the Fourth International should Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel had emerged within the Fourth
involve intensive discussion on the way in which the unified International reflecting political pressures similar to those to which the

BLPI had adapted. Pabloism rapidly destroyed what remained of the BLPI the USSR weigh incomparably less in the balance than the blows dealt by
in India. the Soviet bureaucracy, especially through its actions in the buffer zone,
11-5. In Sri Lanka, pressure mounted on the BLPI to merge with the against the consciousness of the world proletariat.”[21]
LSSP, especially after a by-election in 1949 in which the split “left” vote 12-3. As was later explained: “The use of the term deformed places
enabled the UNP to win the seat. The by-election became an argument for central attention upon the crucial historical difference between the
unity to strengthen the party in the parliamentary and trade union arenas. overturn of the capitalist state in October 1917 and the overturns which
The merger of the BLPI and LSSP in June 1950 is presented in the occurred in the late 1940s in Eastern Europe—that is, the absence of mass
various LSSP histories as a fusion of two Trotskyist parties. In reality, it organs of proletarian power, Soviets led by a Bolshevik-type party.
was the liquidation of the BLPI into what was an opportunist formation Moreover, the term implies the merely transitory existence of state
that was rapidly accommodating to parliamentarism and syndicalism. As regimes of dubious historical viability, whose actions in every
a result of the merger, N.M. Perera, head of the largest bloc of opposition sphere—political and economic—bear the stamp of the distorted and
seats, became the parliamentary opposition leader. Unwilling to abnormal character of their birth. Thus, far from associating such regimes
accommodate to the framework of the merged LSSP, Philip Gunawardena with new historical vistas, the designation deformed underscores the
took a further step to the right, broke from the LSSP completely and historical bankruptcy of Stalinism and points imperiously to the necessity
formed his own party—the Viplavakari LSSP or VLSSP. for the building of a genuine Marxist leadership, the mobilisation of the
11-6. The program of the unified LSSP was confined to Sri Lanka. It working class against the ruling bureaucracy in a political revolution, the
was a collection of abstract truisms designed to avoid any examination of creation of genuine organs of workers’ power, and the destruction of the
the critical strategic experiences through which the BLPI and the Fourth countless surviving vestiges of the old capitalist relations within the state
International had passed. It made no reference to any of the post-war structure and economy.”[22] As early as 1949, however, Pablo
political experiences of the working class in Sri Lanka, let alone transformed what had been a provisional characterisation of regimes of a
elsewhere in Asia or internationally. The Chinese Revolution that had transitory character into a long-term perspective for “centuries” of
taken place less than a year before was not mentioned. The program made “deformed workers’ states” that imbued Stalinism with a historically
no explicit reference to the Theory of Permanent Revolution. None of the progressive role. Adapting to the framework of the Cold War, Pablo
political differences that had emerged in the previous five years were replaced the struggle of the international proletariat against capitalism
discussed. The program declared that the party stood “uncompromisingly with a new “objective reality” that “consists essentially of the capitalist
opposed to all forms of chauvinism” but did not discuss the LSSP’s regime and the Stalinist world.”
adaptation in 1947 to the communal politics of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. 12-4. This new “reality” excluded any independent role for the working
Likewise it referred to the need for “real national independence” but did class and the Fourth International. At the Third World Congress in 1951,
not deal with the LSSP’s abstention on the independence vote in 1948. In Pablo drew out the liquidationist implications of his theories, declaring:
reality, the “fusion” amounted to a return to Samasamajism, that is, to the “What distinguishes us still more from the past, what makes for the
national tradition of Sri Lankan radicalism. The failure to discuss these quality of our movement today and constitutes the surest gauge of our
issues demonstrated the real relations in the new party: the rightwing future victories, is our growing capacity to understand, to appreciate the
headed by N.M. Perera was in charge, while the former BLPI leaders mass movement as it exists—often confused, often under treacherous,
provided him with “Trotskyist” credentials. Far from intervening to opportunist, centrist, bureaucratic and even bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
demand a political clarification and to oppose this unprincipled leaderships—and our endeavours to find a place in this movement with the
unification, the International Secretariat under Michel Pablo gave its aim of raising it from its present to higher levels.”[23]
blessing and accepted the LSSP as the Sri Lankan section of the Fourth 12-5. In relation to Latin America, Pablo called for the liquidation of the
International. Trotskyist movement into the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist mass
movements regardless of the class character of their leaderships. To label
12. Pabloite Opportunism such movements, he declared, “as reactionary, fascist or of no concern to
12-1. The political pressures generated by the post-war restabilisation of us would be proof of the old type of ‘Trotskyist’ immaturity and of a
capitalism exhibited in the BLPI’s liquidation found their theoretical dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic judgement of the mass movement …
expression in the emergence of a revisionist current within the Fourth Elsewhere, as in South Africa, Egypt, the North African colonies, in the
International led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. What began with Near East, we understand that the eventual formation of a revolutionary
Pablo’s abandonment of Trotsky’s assessment of the party now takes the road of unconditional support of the national,
counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism came to embrace a revision of anti-imperialist mass movement and of integration into this
all the fundamentals of Marxism, replacing the struggle for the political movement.”[24] This orientation represented a complete repudiation of
independence of the working class with the wholesale liquidation of the the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the struggle for the political
sections of the Fourth International into the agencies of the bourgeoisie independence of the working class from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
operating within the workers’ movement in every country. leaderships in the backward capitalist countries. The implications of this
12-2. Only after careful deliberation had the Fourth International program were already evident in Sri Lanka and India where Philip
characterised the Stalinist regimes in the so-called buffer states of Eastern Gunawardena and N.M. Perera had been advancing similar arguments
Europe as “deformed workers’ states” in response to their abrupt turn in against the old Trotskyism of the “dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic”
1947–1948 to the nationalisation of industry and commencement of BLPI to justify their adaptation to Bandaranaike.
bureaucratic state planning. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was the 12-6. In 1948, Pablo had cautioned the BLPI against entry into the
product of a proletarian revolution, these states were “deformed” from the Socialist Party of India. By February 1952, however, he was advocating
outset. The changes to property relations did not issue from mass organs entrism sui generis (entrism of a special type) across-the-board
of proletarian power, Soviets, led by a Bolshevik-type party, but were internationally. As in India, entrism now was not a temporary tactical
imposed from above by Stalinist parties that suppressed any independent manoeuvre, but a long-term perspective, justified on the assumption that
activity of the working class. Moreover, as the Fourth International any future radicalisation would and could only take place through the
explained: “From the world point of view, the reforms realised by the existing labour organisations. The outcome of entrism sui generis in India
Soviet bureaucracy in the sense of the assimilation of the buffer zone to had already resulted in the demoralisation and disorientation of former

BLPI cadres, who were trapped in an organisation that blocked any fight 6. The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth
for a Trotskyist program. The application of this opportunist tactic International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it
internationally resulted in the destruction of more sections of the Fourth all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all its
International. petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade union
12-7. The theoretical foundation of Pabloite opportunism was the bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and conversely, know
method of objectivism. As was later explained: “The standpoint of how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois
objectivism is contemplation rather than revolutionary practical activity, agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.[26]
of observation rather than struggle; it justifies what is happening rather 12-10. The Open Letter reviewed the role of Pablo in providing a
than explains what must be done. This method provided the theoretical political cover for Stalinism in the 1953 strike movement in East
underpinnings for a perspective in which Trotskyism was no longer seen Germany and the French general strike. Turning to the fate of the Chinese
as the doctrine guiding the practical activity of a party determined to Trotskyists at the hands of Pablo, the Open Letter declared: “Particularly
conquer power and change the course of history, but rather as a general revolting is the slanderous misrepresentation Pablo has fostered of the
interpretation of a historical process in which socialism would ultimately political position of the Chinese section of the Fourth International. They
be realised under the leadership of non-proletarian forces hostile to the have been pictured by the Pablo faction as ‘sectarians’, as ‘refugees from
Fourth International. Insofar as Trotskyism was to be credited with any a revolution’ ... Pablo’s line of conciliationism towards Stalinism leads
direct role in the course of events, it was merely as a sort of subliminal him inexorably to touch up the Mao regime couleur de rose while putting
mental process unconsciously guiding the activities of Stalinists, grey tints on the firm, principled stand of our Chinese comrades.”[27]
neo-Stalinists, semi-Stalinists and, of course, petty-bourgeois nationalists 12-11. After a thorough consideration of the evolution of the Maoist
of one type or another.”[25] regime that the Socialist Workers Party in the US and the ICFI designated
12-8. The objectivist method transformed the Theory of Permanent China as a deformed workers’ state. In a resolution adopted at its 1955
Revolution from a revolutionary guide to action for the sections of the national convention, the SWP provided a detailed analysis of the Chinese
Fourth International into an external description of an inexorable revolution: its impact on world politics and the transformation of class
historical process that worked itself out through the medium of other relations within China as well as of the Stalinist CCP and its policies.
parties and leaderships. Instead of providing the means for building Summing up the process, the document concluded that after the 1949
Trotskyist parties in the working class, the Theory of Permanent revolution: “The objective dynamics, the inner logic of the struggle
Revolution was converted by the Pabloites into a method for glorifying against imperialist intervention forced the bureaucracy to break with
movements led by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties. capitalism, nationalise the decisive means of production, impose the
12-9. The political struggle against Pabloite opportunism culminated in monopoly of foreign trade, institute planning, and in this way clear the
the publication of the Open Letter to the world Trotskyist movement on road for the introduction of production relations and institutions that
November 16, 1953 by James P. Cannon, the leader of the American constitute the foundation of a workers’ state, which China is today, even
Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The Open Letter was the rallying point though a Stalinist caricature thereof. China is a deformed workers’ state
for orthodox Trotskyists and led to the formation of the International because of the Stalinist deformation of the Third Chinese
Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) with the support of the Revolution.”[28]
British and French sections. The letter summarised the fundamental 12-12. The subsequent evolution of the Chinese regime, which restored
principles of Trotskyism: capitalist property relations in the 1980s and transformed the country into
1. The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of the world’s premier cheap labour platform, has fully vindicated the
civilisation through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric International Committee’s principled position. In opposition to the
manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today Pabloites, the ICFI insisted that, without the overthrow of the CCP regime
underlines the danger in the gravest possible way. through a political revolution led by the working class, the Maoists guided
2. The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing by the nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One Country” would
capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and inevitably become the agents of capitalist restoration as was foreseen by
thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. At the same time, the ICFI opposed
days. various “state capitalist” tendencies that dismissed the enormous sweep of
3. This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working the Chinese Revolution, the subsequent nationalisation of private
class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis in leadership enterprises and the institution of economic planning, and in doing so,
although the world relationship of social forces was never so favourable sided openly or tacitly with imperialism against the deformed workers’
as today for the workers to take the road to power. state.
4. To organise itself for carrying out this world-historic aim, the To be continued
working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist Footnotes:
party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of 21. David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the
dialectically combining democracy and centralism—democracy in arriving History of the Fourth International (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p.
at decisions, centralism in carrying them out; a leadership controlled by 158.
the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion. 22. Ibid., pp. 178–9.
5. The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through 23. Ibid., p. 194.
exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only 24. Ibid., pp. 194–5.
later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either into the arms of the 25. Ibid., p. 188.
Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The 26. In Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One (London: New
penalty for these betrayals is paid by working people in the form of Park, 1974), pp. 299-300.
consolidation of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of war 27. Ibid., p.312.
fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth 28. The Third Chinese Revolution and its aftermath, Education for
International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of Socialists, Socialist Workers Party National Education Department, 1976,
Stalinism inside and outside the USSR. p. 7.



Lanka)—Part 6
31 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and provided no leadership to the mass movement. It failed to take such
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) elementary steps as to issue a call for action committees in factories,
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in suburbs and villages to prosecute the campaign and for workers defence
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. guards against state repression. Instead the LSSP leaders joined the CP
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 and VLSSP in calling for an end to the hartal, leaving those who
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 continued to protest to face state violence alone. In a lengthy article,
Colvin R. de Silva declared the hartal to be a new stage of the class
13. The LSSP’s response to the Open Letter struggle that bore “the imprint of the worker-peasant alliance.” But he
13-1. The LSSP’s refusal to support the SWP and the ICFI in opposing concluded that the fight was now “to compel the UNP government to
Pabloite opportunism was the turning point in its history and greatly resign and hold a fresh general election.” The LSSP had all along viewed
accelerated its political degeneration. While critical of Pablo’s the hartal as nothing more than an adjunct to its parliamentary
pro-Stalinist orientation, the LSSP leadership strongly sympathised with manoeuvring. As a result Bandaranaike was able to capitalise on the mass
the underlying liquidationist orientation that sanctioned its own adaptation opposition sentiment and to gain influence, particularly among the
to national reformist politics—a combination of parliamentarism and trade Sinhala rural masses disillusioned by the lack of LSSP leadership.
union syndicalism. Both parliament and the trade unions are hostile arenas Bandaranaike’s political rise was further cemented when the LSSP
that the revolutionary party is obliged to use to fight for its perspective but backed his no-confidence motion in the UNP government. Shocked by the
inevitably they place strong pressures on the party to adapt to reformist scope of the hartal, significant sections of the Sri Lankan ruling elite
illusions in the working class. Although still espousing Trotskyism in swung their support behind the SLFP as an alternate means for propping
word, the LSSP leaders increasingly came to measure their success in up capitalist rule. While he had opposed the protests and his SLFP did not
terms of the number of their parliamentary seats and the size of their trade participate, the hartal was the making of Bandaranaike as a pivotal figure
unions. They viewed parliamentary combinations and strikes around for the Sri Lankan ruling class.
limited economic demands, rather than the independent political 13-4. In the wake of the Hartal, the clamour inside the LSSP for “left
mobilisation of the working class, as the path to socialism. unity” with the Stalinist CP and VLSSP intensified. After the 1952
13-2. The consequences of the LSSP’s opportunist orientation had election, a tendency had emerged that blamed the party’s losses on its
already been demonstrated in the events of August 1953—a major crisis for failure to reach a no-contest pact with the CP and VLSSP, which had
bourgeois rule on the island. In the 1952 general election, the UNP had demanded the LSSP drop its criticism of the Stalinist regimes in the
won a convincing majority, the unified LSSP had lost seats and a new Soviet Union and China. Encouraged by Pablo’s pro-Stalinist line at the
party—the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) formed by Third Congress, the “unity” faction put forward an amendment at the
S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike in 1951 made its first modest showing. Within a LSSP congress in October 1953 calling for the party to be “friendly
year, however, the UNP government all but collapsed under the impact of unconditionally” to the “socialist countries”. After the amendment was
a semi-insurrectionary movement of the working class and peasantry defeated, the pro-Stalinist grouping broke away, its adherents joining
provoked by government measures to stem the economic crisis created by either the CP or VLSSP.
the end of the Korean War. The LSSP, supported by the Communist 13-5. It was in this context that the LSSP leadership responded to the
Party, the VLSSP and the Federal Party, called a one-day hartal—a general Open Letter. Its rejection of Cannon’s appeal and refusal to join the
strike and closure of businesses—on August 12 to protest against price International Committee were all the more politically criminal as the
rises. The response took all of the parties, including the LSSP, by former BLPI leaders were well aware of the pro-Stalinist character of
surprise. The strike brought Colombo to a halt and protests spread through Pablo’s revisions. Moreover, it had just experienced firsthand the impact
the rural areas of the south and west. In many areas protesters defied of Pabloism in its own ranks. But the LSSP objected in legalistic terms to
police violence, blocked roads and tore up railway tracks. A panicked the manner in which the Open Letter was issued and refused to take a
UNP government met on a British warship in Colombo harbour, declared political stand. Cannon wrote to Leslie Goonewardene, noting that the
a state of emergency, called out the military, sealed the offices and press LSSP had expelled its own pro-Stalinist tendency, then pointedly added:
of working-class parties and imposed a curfew. Nine people were shot “As internationalists, it is obligatory that we take the same attitude toward
dead by police in protests that continued for two more days. open or covert manifestations of Stalinist conciliationism in other parties,
13-3. Subsequent LSSP mythology has seized on the 1953 hartal to and in the international movement generally.[29]
demonstrate the party’s revolutionary character. In reality, the LSSP 13-6. Belatedly, the LSSP Central Committee passed a resolution in

April 1954 recognising the far-reaching consequences of Pablo’s claim 14-3. The LSSP opposed the Sinhala-only policy and defended the
that Stalinist parties could be pushed onto the revolutionary road by mass democratic rights of the Tamil minority despite violent attacks by Sinhala
pressure. “This concept not only leads to a fundamental revision of the racists. The arguments used by LSSP leaders, however, betrayed a marked
positions of Trotskyism in regard to Stalinism but also denies to the shift from the BLPI’s proletarian internationalism. The LSSP not only
Trotskyist movement all justification for its continued independent accepted the legitimacy of the Sri Lankan state but also argued that the
existence,” it declared. In practice, however, the LSSP sought to Sinhala-only policy would undermine the nation. Their opposition was
conciliate and manoeuvre to preserve “unity” with the Pabloites, at the based on defending the unity of the nation, not on fighting for the unity of
expense of political clarification and principle, only compounding the the working class. Speaking in parliament in October 1955, N.M. Perera
difficulties facing the SWP and ICFI. The LSSP leaders ultimately warned: “We shall have a perpetual division of the country, we shall
capitulated to Pabloism. They attended the Pabloite Fourth Congress later never get a united Ceylon, and we shall have a tremendous amount of
in 1954, thus lending it legitimacy, supported its resolutions with minor bloodshed which will lead us nowhere, and, in the end, this country will
amendments and remained with the Pabloite International Secretariat. It either become a colony or a plaything of interested big powers.”[30] It
was the start of a thoroughly opportunist relationship that was to have was not a stand taken on principle. Despite Bandaranaike’s
disastrous consequences for the working class. The LSSP could claim “Sinhala-only” policy, the LSSP struck an electoral “no-contest” pact
Trotskyist credentials for its reformist politics in the national arena, while with the SLFP—thus giving credence to this bourgeois party as a
the International Secretariat could boast of having “a mass Trotskyist progressive alternative to the UNP. After the SLFP won a sweeping
party” in Asia. The LSSP’s support for Pabloism was a terrible blow victory, the LSSP adopted a stance of “responsive co-operation” towards
against Trotskyism and thus the working class, particularly in Asia. If the the new Bandaranaike government and in 1956 and 1957 voted for the
LSSP, or a section of it, had taken a principled stand, it would have Throne Speech outlining government policy for the year. It only became
immensely strengthened the International Committee, advanced its work critical of Bandaranaike with the emergence of strikes from late 1957.
throughout the region, especially in India, and acted as a powerful 14-4. The thrust of the new SLFP-led government was the assertion of
antidote to the pernicious influence of Maoism. Sinhala dominance in all spheres, provoking protests by Tamils, and
vicious counter-pogroms by Sinhala extremists who regarded any attempt
14. The LSSP’s political backsliding on Bandaranaike’s part to reach a compromise with the Tamil elites as a
14-1. The LSSP degenerated rapidly after 1953, aided and abetted at betrayal. The limited nationalisations carried out by his government
every stage by the Pabloite International Secretariat. In the space of just expanded the role of the state and thus job opportunities for the Sinhalese
over a decade, the party abandoned any struggle for Trotskyism, majority. The extension of public education and health was aimed at
embraced Sinhala communalism and betrayed the working class by consolidating a base among the party’s Sinhala rural constituency. The
entering a bourgeois SLFP-led coalition government in 1964, thereby government, however, was incapable of meeting the basic needs of
assuming political responsibility for the management of the capitalist workers and the rural masses. This led to strikes and protests. The
state. The LSSP’s degeneration was intimately bound up at every step anti-working class character of the SLFP-led government soon became
with its political adaptation to Bandaranaike and the SLFP—that is, to the apparent in its strengthening of the Public Security Act in March 1958
communal politics of Sinhala populism that, in the early stages at least, followed shortly after by the imposition of a 10-month state of
were laced with anti-imperialist and socialistic demagogy. The inability of emergency. Having exploited the politics of Sinhala communalism to
the LSSP to take a firm, principled stand against the SLFP was connected develop a rural base for the SLFP and to divide the working class,
to its reversion to the petty-bourgeois radical traditions of Samasamajism. Bandaranaike fell victim to his own creation. He was assassinated by a
It was no longer a politically homogeneous party. Layers of former BLPI Buddhist extremist in September 1959. The rightwing of his own party,
members were still rooted in the traditions of proletarian internationalism who feared that the government was incapable of containing a growing
that had been graphically demonstrated in the huge rally in 1948 against working class movement, was also implicated. The same rightwing had
the fraud of the new “independent” state. However, the increasingly already insisted on the dismissal of Philip Gunawardena as government
nationalist orientation was determined by party’s rightwing led by N.M. minister. Gunawardena appropriated the name of MEP for his own new
Perera, to which ex-BLPI figures such Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Sinhala racialist party.
Goonewardene acquiesced. Step by step, Perera overcame internal 14-5. The year 1960 marked a further shift to the right by the LSSP. In
resistance to an open embrace of the SLFP and its Sinhala populism. the first of two elections in March, the LSSP abandoned any semblance of
14-2. In preparing for the 1956 election, Bandaranaike sought to revolutionary Marxism and embraced the parliamentary road to socialism.
mobilise layers of the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie—small businessmen, Declaring the UNP and SLFP to be completely discredited, the party
Buddhist monks and ayurvedic doctors—aggrieved by their campaigned for “a Samasamajist government”—through parliament. It
marginalisation under the British colonial administration. Drawing on the significantly watered down its previous stance on the language
demagogy of the earlier Buddhist revivalist movement, Bandaranaike issue—dropping its call for parity between Sinhala and Tamil—and on
argued that the Sinhalese were “a unique race” that had to be accorded the citizenship—now declaring the issue could be negotiated between the Sri
dominant position in the country’s affairs. In 1955, the SLFP abandoned Lankan and Indian governments, without any reference to plantation
its demand that both Sinhala and Tamil replace English as the country’s workers. The Pabloite International Secretariat enthusiastically endorsed
official language. Instead it adopted a “Sinhala only” policy that would the LSSP’s parliamentary cretinism and adaptation to communal politics,
make Sinhala the sole official language—that is, in the courts, public sector describing its election campaign as “a decisive struggle for power”.
employment, the education system and all official matters. Bandaranaike 14-6. Far from winning office, the LSSP gained fewer seats than in the
also promised to accord Buddhism a special official standing. By 1956 election, provoking a crisis in the party. N.M. Perera took the
proposing to make Sinhala supremacism the guiding principle of state opportunity to propose for the first time that the party prepare to enter a
policy, the SLFP relegated ethnic Tamils and Tamil-speaking Muslims to capitalist government with the SLFP. His resolution was passed at a party
a second-class status. To provide his Sinhala populism with socialist and congress in May 1960, but was thwarted by the election of a Central
anti-imperialist window-dressing, Bandaranaike brought Philip Committee in which his rightwing was in a minority. Nevertheless, when
Gunawardena’s VLSSP into his Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) or the short-lived UNP government collapsed and new elections took place
People’s United Front for the 1956 election. in July 1960, the LSSP reached a no-contest agreement with the SLFP.

With the election of a new SLFP government led by Bandaranaike’s 15-3. Between 1961 and 1963, the British Trotskyists of the Socialist
widow, the LSSP supported its overall policies by voting for its first Labour League (SLL) led a determined struggle within the International
Throne Speech and its first budget. Committee against the SWP’s opportunism. The SLL rejected the SWP’s
14-7. Only now did the Pabloite International Secretariat (IS) start to contention that petty bourgeois leaderships could be forced by “the logic
raise tepid criticisms. It had not objected to the LSSP’s previous of the revolution itself” to lead the working class to power and
no-contest pact and “responsive cooperation” with the SLFP in 1956. The emphasised that the central task confronting the Fourth International
only IS criticism of the LSSP’s parliamentary road to socialism in the remained the resolution of the crisis of proletarian leadership through the
March 1960 election was that it had not been successful and a “profound construction of Bolshevik-type parties. After reviewing the struggle
examination” was needed to ascertain the reasons for the electoral defeat. against revisionism, the SLL concluded in 1961: “It is time to draw to a
However, with N.M. Perera proposing to enter a capitalist government, close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend
the IS began a political cover up for its own gross opportunism. It within Trotskyism.”
belatedly declared that “the no-contest agreement” carried the danger of 15-4. In relation to Cuba, the SWP employed Pablo’s and Mandel’s
“creating illusions about the nature of the SLFP among the great masses.” objectivist method. In its July 1962 document, “Trotskyism Betrayed: The
The Sixth World Congress condemned the LSSP’s support for the Throne SWP accepts the political method of Pabloite revisionism,” the SLL
Speech and government budget. But the IS did not rule out giving National Committee declared: “In our communications with the SWP we
“critical support to a non-working class government (whether middle provoked a strong reaction by daring to suggest that talk about
class or capitalist) in a colonial or semi-colonial country” and, in so doing ‘confirming the permanent revolution’ without the revolutionary parties
endorsed, the LSSP’s rightward drift and provided the rationalisation for was nonsense. In practice, however, both the Pabloites and the SWP find
its continuing opportunism. themselves prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in
14-8. Pabloism also sanctioned the LSSP’s accommodation to the Cuba and Algeria. Our view of this question is not opposed to that of the
Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. In 1957, in the wake of SWP simply in terms of who can best explain a series of events. It is a
the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an LSSP delegation including Edmund question rather of the actual policy and program of Trotskyist leadership
Samarakkody and Colvin R. de Silva visited Moscow as official guests in these backward countries. The theory of permanent revolution is, like
and made no mention of the Soviet army’s suppression of Hungarian all Marxist theory, a guide to action; analysis becomes the pointer to the
workers. In the same year, the LSSP newspaper published an editorial need to organise an independent and determined working class and its
entitled “Tribute to Chou En-lai” and hailed the Chinese foreign minister allies in the peasantry for their own soviet power. ‘Confirming the
and his fellow Stalinists for “the tremendous sacrifices made by these permanent revolution’ is not an accolade to be conferred by Marxists on
men who led the Chinese Revolution to victory.” The American Socialist approved nationalist leaders but a task for which Marxists themselves
Workers Party criticised the LSSP in an editorial that declared, “Chou En have the responsibility.”[32]
Lai and the Chinese Communist Party did not lead ‘the Chinese 15-5. Moreover, the SLL insisted that the so-called successes
Communist Party to victory,’ nor can they legitimately be identified with proclaimed by the SWP in Cuba and Algeria had to be assessed as part of
that victory.” It called on the upcoming LSSP delegation to China to an overall balance sheet of Stalinism and petty bourgeois radicalism in
strongly demand the release of the Chinese Trotskyists, which the LSSP mass struggles in backward capitalist countries. “Besides Cuba and
leaders flatly refused to do. Algeria—and in order to understand both of these—the experience of Iraq,
Iran, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, Indo-China, and many other
15. The SWP reunification countries must be taken into account. What would emerge from such a
15-1. In 1953, SWP leader James P. Cannon had concluded his Open historical analysis is the true role played by those leaders of the working
Letter by declaring: “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism class who have proceeded from the theory of ‘two stages’. Stalinism, far
and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible from being ‘forced to play a progressive role’, has in fact disarmed and
politically or organisationally.”[31] Quite quickly, however, the SWP betrayed the advanced workers in every one of these countries and has
began to soften its opposition to Pabloism. As early as 1957, Cannon enabled a bourgeois government to establish temporary
responded positively to a letter from Leslie Goonewardene sounding out stabilisation—which is all imperialism can hope for at the present stage. It
the prospects of the SWP’s unification with the International Secretariat. is in this sense and this sense only that the ‘theory of Permanent
The shift was part of the SWP’s increasing adaptation to American Revolution has been confirmed’.”[33]
middle-class radical circles under the pressure of the post-war boom. 15-6. The SLL also opposed the SWP’s claim that the 1962 Evian
15-2. In fact, the gulf between orthodox Trotskyism and Pabloism had agreement for Algerian “independence” between the French government
widened, but the SWP was adopting opportunist positions similar to those and Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) leadership represented “a major
of the IS. By late 1960, the SWP, now under the leadership of Joseph victory for the Algerian people, for the Arab and colonial revolution”.
Hansen, was glorifying the Cuban regime, established by Fidel Castro and The SLL defended the Fourth International’s assessment—clearly
his petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement, as a “workers’ state”. Based on elaborated by the BLPI in relation to India and Sri Lanka—of such formal
crude empiricism, the SWP asserted that the proletarian nature of the post-war independence agreements under which the national bourgeoisie
Cuban state was determined by Castro’s nationalisation of the largely took on the role of safeguarding imperialist interests. The SLL explained:
agricultural economy, ignoring its open hostility to any independent “The Algerian petty bourgeoisie seeks to fill the place vacated by French
action by the working class and the lack of any organs of workers’ power. colonialism, while continuing to be a loyal guarantor of the fundamental
Moreover, as Castro turned to the Soviet Union for assistance against US interests of French capital in North Africa. We see the Evian agreements
imperialism and fused his July 26th Movement with the Cuban Stalinists, as the expression of that willingness, in which the FLN leaders remain
the SWP insisted that the Castroites were becoming Marxists in the course true to their nature.”[34]
of the revolution. The SWP’s veneration of “the first victorious socialist 15-7. Without any discussion of the theoretical and political issues that
revolution in the Americas”, which “raised the entire colonial had led to the 1953 split, the SWP, and groups in many Latin American
revolutionary process to a new plateau of achievement” and gave “fresh countries that had hitherto been affiliated to the ICFI and traditionally
confirmation of the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution”, looked to the US Trotskyists for leadership, formally reunified with the
became the touchstone for its reunification with the Pabloites. Pabloites at their Seventh Congress in Rome in June 1963. In what was a

complete rejection of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the main
resolution of the Pabloite “World Congress” concluded from the Cuban
revolution that “the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has
opened the possibility of coming to power with a blunted
instrument”—that is, without a Leninist party fighting for the independent
mobilisation of the working class. The Pabloites’ glorification of Castro
and guerrilla “armed struggle” was to prove a disastrous dead-end in
Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and across Latin America, serving to isolate
revolutionary elements from the working class and contributing to historic
defeats. The LSSP leaders, who were investing the capitalist SLFP with
the functions of “a blunted instrument” in Sri Lanka, fully supported the
reunification and the formation of the new United Secretariat. In turn, the
SWP lauded the LSSP as a mass Trotskyist party.
To be continued
Footnotes:
29. Emphasis in the original; Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume
Two (London: New Park 1974), p. 89.
30. Blows against the Empire, p. 169.
31. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One, p. 312.
32. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Three (London: New Park,
1974), p. 244.
33. Ibid., p. 250.
34. Ibid., p. 248.



Lanka)—Part 7
2 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and approved, made major concessions to the MEP’s communal politics.
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) Having dropped its demand for parity between the Sinhala and Tamil
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in languages in 1960, the LSSP now agreed to a common platform that
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. vaguely called for the existing Sinhala-only legislation to be made less
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 discriminatory. Within the LSSP Central Committee, a minority led by
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 Edmund Samarakkody correctly condemned the ULF program as popular
frontism but did not call for the LSSP to break from the ULF.
16. The Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka Samarakkody’s stance was a typical centrist evasion—he was capable of
16-1. The entry of the LSSP into the government of Madame Sirima recognising the opportunist character of what was proposed, but not of
Bandaranaike in June 1964 was a watershed in the history of the Fourth drawing the necessary political conclusions and breaking with the Perera
International—for the first time a party claiming to be Trotskyist directly leadership. The only Trotskyist criticism came from the SLL in Britain
entered the service of the bourgeoisie. The political responsibility for the which denounced the ULF as opportunist and called on the “hundreds of
betrayal rested squarely with the United Secretariat (USec) and confirmed devoted communists in the LSSP” to reaffirm the “principles and
all of the SLL’s warnings about the unprincipled reunification of the program of the FI and purge the party of revisionism and the revisionist
SWP with the Pabloites just a year before. The leader of the British SLL, leaders.”[37]
Gerry Healy, explained that the LSSP’s betrayal was “the most complete 16-4. From its inception in 1960, the SLFP government had been in
example” of betrayal by Pablo, Mandel and Pierre Frank. “These people crisis. In response to widespread protests by Tamils over the Sinhala-only
must take responsibility, since they have been in constant communication policy, Bandaranaike proscribed the Federal Party and imposed a state of
with the LSSP in Ceylon, for the past 18 years. The answer [to the emergency for much of 1961. Amidst a rising strike movement over the
question of the LSSP’s degeneration] lies not in Ceylon, but in an government’s austerity measures, the government banned industrial
international study of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. The real action and deployed the army on the docks. A failed coup attempt by
architects of the coalition reside in Paris.”[35] senior police and military officers in January 1962 reflected fears in
16-2. The road to the LSSP’s entry into the Bandaranaike sections of the ruling class about Bandaranaike’s ability to contain the
government—the United Left Front (ULF) of the LSSP with the Stalinist working class. Strikes were given further impetus by the formation of the
CP and Philip Gunawardena’s MEP—was encouraged and sanctioned by Joint Committee of Trade Unions Organisation (JCTUO) in September
the USec. The International Secretariat had called in 1960 for an electoral 1963 unifying all unions, including those of plantation workers, around 21
front of “working class parties” and the 1963 unification congress common demands. A 69-day strike by the LSSP’s Ceylon Mercantile
declared that the LSSP had “correctly raised the question of a United Left Union (CMU) defied a government ultimatum to return to work and
Front, both to arrest the movement to the right and to help these masses to forced significant concessions by January 1964. Uncertain of her
move towards an alternative left.”[36] The ULF, however, was precisely parliamentary majority, Bandaranaike prorogued parliament in February.
the type of Popular Front that Trotsky had opposed in the 1930s. 16-5. With her cabinet in crisis over how to deal with the mass
Moreover, it involved parties with a proven track record of class working-class movement, Bandaranaike opened talks with the ULF
collaboration—the racist MEP had participated in the 1956 SLFP parties. On March 21, as LSSP leaders were addressing a huge rally of the
government and the Stalinist CP had been part of the Ceylon National 21-demands movement on Galle Face Green, including large contingents
Congress during the war and would have joined the first UNP government of plantation workers, N.M. Perera held secret discussions with
if the UNP had been willing. Bandaranaike over the formation of a coalition government. When the
16-3. The ULF platform was formally signed on August 12, 1963—the talks became public knowledge, Bandaranaike, a class-conscious
10th anniversary of the 1953 hartal—amid great professions of working representative of the bourgeoisie, justified her actions by openly
class unity. This opportunist formation had nothing in common with the explaining the various options: “Some feel that these [strike] troubles can
united front tactic of Trotsky who had insisted on the political be eliminated by the establishment of a dictatorship. Others say that the
independence of the revolutionary party and no mixing of political workers should be made to work at the point of gun and bayonet. Still
programs, banners and slogans. The joint ULF platform was not “a others maintain that a national government should be formed to solve this
genuinely socialist program”, as the Pabloites declared, but a list of problem. I have considered these ideas separately and in the context of
limited reforms to be achieved through parliament and within the world events. My conclusion is that none of these solutions will help to
framework of capitalism. Moreover, the program, which the USec get us where we want to go … Therefore, gentlemen, I decided to initiate

talks with the leaders of the working class, particularly Mr. Philip of the Fourth International. It is in the direct service of imperialism, in the
Gunawardena and Mr. N.M. Perera.”[38] preparation of a defeat for the working class that revisionism in the world
16-6. The LSSP rightwing led by Perera, supported by the so-called Trotskyist movement has found its expression.”[40]
“centre” faction led by Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene,
hurriedly convened a party conference for June 6–7 to authorise a 17. The formation of the RCL
coalition with the SLFP. Gerry Healy, who flew to Colombo on behalf of 17-1. Coming in the wake of the LSSP’s betrayal, the formation of the
the ICFI, was barred from entering the conference, but campaigned Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) as the Sri Lankan section of the
vigorously outside. Inside, the resolution moved by Perera justified the ICFI in 1968 was the product of the intersection of the political and
betrayal by arguing that the SLFP was not a capitalist party, but “a party theoretical struggle waged by the International Committee against
based on the radical petty-bourgeoisie and the lower middle class” that Pabloism and a radicalisation of workers and youth in Sri Lanka that
“had shed some of the more reactionary elements” and carried out foreshadowed the period of revolutionary upheavals internationally from
“various measures for nationalisation.” While these declarations were a 1968 to 1975.
complete negation of everything that Trotsky had written on political 17-2. As a small island state vulnerable to global economic and political
formations such as the Kuomintang in China, they were fully in line with shocks, Sri Lanka has tended to be a harbinger of broader international
the Pabloite glorification of the petty-bourgeois leaderships in Cuba and processes. An acute balance of payments crisis produced by falling tea
Algeria. The resolution also made clear that the LSSP leadership had prices in the early 1960s, combined with an international downturn,
completely capitulated to the SLFP’s communalism—the list of 10 policies generated high levels of unemployment. Young people were the hardest
agreed upon with Bandaranaike did not refer to the language or hit, including university graduates. Youth and workers were radicalised
citizenship issues. The resolution of the “centre” laid bare the political not only through the developing movement against the Bandaranaike
and moral collapse of the former BLPI revolutionaries—de Silva and government but by the crimes of American imperialism—including the
Goonewardene. Their only “difference” with Perera was the terms of murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the escalating US involvement
surrender to the SLFP—the coalition government, they argued, should in the Vietnam War. Despite the LSSP’s political degeneration, the
include the other ULF parties, not just the LSSP. Trotskyist traditions of the BLPI that clung to it still proved deeply
16-7. The resolution of the newly-formed Revolutionary Minority attractive. Significant layers of students in schools and universities
unambiguously condemned the proposed coalition government as regarded themselves as Trotskyists. At the country’s main Peradeniya
“treachery to the proletarian revolution”, stating: “The entry of the LSSP university, the Trotskyists predominated.
leaders into the SLFP government will result in open class collaboration, 17-3. The LSSP’s betrayal had a profound impact in Sri Lanka and
disorientation of the masses, the division of the working class and the internationally. The LSSP, along with the Pabloite leadership, through
abandonment of the struggle perspective, which will lead to the disruption their adaptation to Stalinism, and especially the glorification of Maoism,
of the working class movement and the elimination of the independent had allowed the influence of Stalinist parties throughout Asia to go
revolutionary axis of the Left. In the result, the forces of capitalist unchallenged. Now the Stalinists could use the LSSP’s treachery to
reaction, far from being weakened or thwarted, will be ultimately deflect attention from their own political crimes. That was particularly the
strengthened.” After the vote—501 for Perera’s resolution, 75 for the case in India, where Pabloism had effectively destroyed the Trotskyist
“centre” and 159 for the opposition—the Revolutionary Minority faction movement and allowed the Communist Party of India (CPI) to develop
left the conference, met separately and formed what became the Lanka unopposed. No intervention was made in the crisis that enveloped the CPI
Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary) or LSSP (R). following the 1961 Sino-Soviet split and the 1962 Indo-Chinese border
16-8. The USec played a thoroughly opportunist role throughout. In war and that, in 1964, resulted in the creation of the breakaway
April, that is weeks before the conference, it had been declaring that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ostensibly in opposition to the
ULF in Sri Lanka could “provide another Cuba or Algeria and prove to be “revisionist” CPI. The CPI, the CPI (M), and the Naxalites or Maoists,
even greater inspiration to revolutionary minded workers throughout the who split off from the CPI (M) in 1968–69, all served to politically
world.”[39] When news of Perera’s negotiations with Bandaranaike subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie during the wave of
reached Paris, the USec scrambled to cover up its own political worker and peasant struggles that convulsed India for a decade beginning
responsibility by calling for a return to the ULF. But Healy aptly summed in the late 1960s. The Naxalites demagogically invoked the LSSP’s
up the ULF as “the sugar coating for the bitter pill of coalition”—it was the betrayal, in order to buttress all the stock Stalinist lies and slanders about
political stepping stone used by Perera into the Bandaranaike government. Trotskyism, while pursuing their strategy of peasant-based guerrilla war.
There was no fundamental difference between the ULF program and the 17-4. In Sri Lanka, the LSSP’s naked abandonment of proletarian
LSSP’s deal with Bandaranaike. The USec expelled N.M. Perera and two internationalism and embrace of the SLFP’s Sinhala supremacism opened
others, who became ministers in the SLFP government, suspended those the door for the unrestrained growth of communal politics that was to
LSSP members who voted for his motion, but took no action for months, have catastrophic consequences for the island. The unified 21-demands
against the so-called “centre”, which remained within the LSSP. movement of Sinhala and Tamil workers broke up after the LSSP entered
16-9. The USec suppressed criticism within its ranks of the LSSP the Bandaranaike government and withdrew its support. The LSSP’s
betrayal. Inside the American SWP, supporters of the ICFI led by Tim support for a pact between Bandaranaike and Indian Prime Minister Lal
Wohlforth, who constituted an official minority, were suspended from Bahadur Shastri in October 1964 providing for the forced repatriation of
membership for insisting on an internal party discussion on the LSSP’s half a million Tamil plantation workers led to the immediate collapse of
entry into the Bandaranaike government—an unprecedented event in the LSSP support in this pivotal section of the working class.
history of the Fourth International. The minority, which had fought 17-5. Among radicalised youth, various forms of petty-bourgeois
alongside the SLL since 1961 against the SWP’s reunification with the communal politics gained from the LSSP’s betrayal at the expense of
Pabloites, formed the American Committee for the Fourth International, genuine Marxism. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or People’s
which was transformed into the Workers League in November 1966. Liberation Front, formed in 1966 by former CP Stalinists and Maoists,
16-10. In a statement issued in July 1964, the ICFI drew the following was able to expand among layers of unemployed Sinhala rural youth in
far-sighted conclusion: “The entry of the LSSP members into the the island’s South. The JVP, which drew eclectically on Maoism and
Bandaranaike coalition marks the end of a whole epoch of the evolution Castroism mixed with local Sinhala populism, used the LSSP’s betrayal

to demagogically denounce “Trotskyism.” In the 1970s, as the Sinhala policeman.
chauvinist policies of the second SLFP coalition radicalised sections of 17-10. For all its radicalism, however, the Shakthi group was still based
Tamil youth, various armed Tamil organisations, including the Liberation on the LSSP (R) politics of pressuring the LSSP and CP leaders to the
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), cited the actions of LSSP ministers to left. Inside the LSSP (R), Wilfred “Spike” Perera, who had been a BLPI
justify their opposition to Trotskyism and Marxism. Nearly two decades member during and after the war, challenged the orientation of the
after the LSSP’s betrayal, the reactionary communal politics of the Sri Shakthi group. He wrote a lengthy reply to a September 1965 document
Lankan bourgeoisie erupted in a civil war that convulsed the island for the entitled “Lessons of December” by a Shakthi leader, Nimal (Nanda
next quarter century. Wickremasinghe), who criticised the LSSP (R) for not intervening in the
17-6. Against this political tide, a talented layer of radicalised youth, SLFP-LSSP protests of December 1964 that called on Bandaranaike to
drawn to Trotskyism and the BLPI’s traditions, founded the RCL in 1968. ignore the Throne Speech vote. In his “Not the lessons of December, but
This was only possible, however, through the intervention of the ICFI to the lessons of June”, Spike rejected the document’s impressionist claims
clarify the politics of Pabloism that had produced the LSSP’s betrayal and about the revolutionary potential of these “extra parliamentary struggles”,
continued to dominate the breakaway LSSP (R). Foremost among these pointing out that their demands were the maintenance of a capitalist
youth were Keerthi Balasuriya, who was elected as general secretary at government and the implementation of the racialist Sirima-Shastri pact.
the age of just 19 and led the RCL until his untimely death in 1987, and He insisted that the critical political lessons to be assimilated were those
Wije Dias, who took over as general secretary under those difficult of the LSSP’s betrayal in June 1964. Spike’s document, however, was
circumstances and has directed the party for the past quarter century. The not circulated, as the bulk of the pro-ICFI group, of which he was part,
ability of the RCL to withstand the immense political pressures generated did not want to disrupt its relations with the LSSP (R) leadership.
by the LSSP’s betrayal and the island’s protracted civil war is testimony 17-11. As a result, the Shakthi group came under the influence of V.
to the soundness of the Trotskyist principles on which it was established Karalasingham, an LSSP (R) Political Bureau member and former BLPI
as a section of the ICFI. leader, who as a lawyer had defended the Peradeniya university students.
17-7. The ICFI’s interventions in Sri Lanka through the SLL—first by Karalasingham was also hostile to the LSSP (R) leadership, describing
Gerry Healy in June 1964 and then by Mike Banda, editor of the SLL’s Samarakkody’s vote to bring down the Bandaranaike government as a
Newsletter, in December 1964—resulted in the formation of a pro-ICFI “Himalayan blunder.” This exaggerated criticism of a tactical
grouping inside the LSSP (R). The LSSP (R), however, was a hostile parliamentary error betrayed Karalasingham’s orientation, which was not
political environment—the party was formed in a split with the LSSP, but towards revolutionary Marxism, but back towards the LSSP. In an Open
did not break from Pabloism and remained inside the Pabloite USec. Its Letter for May Day 1966 published in Shakthi, Karalasingham argued that
secretary, Edmund Samarakkody, had attended the 1963 World Congress a SLFP-LSSP government would be a progressive alternative to the
and voted for the reunification with the SWP. At the first LSSP (R) existing UNP regime and would be a step on the path to “a real
conference, the entire leadership combined to block a resolution by an revolutionary government.” Revolutionaries should not fear such a
ICFI sympathiser to debate the “international question”—that is, the development, he wrote, but “should help the emergence of such a
struggle waged by the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism. [coalition] government.” Spike subjected the article to an exhaustive
17-8. The political orientation of the LSSP (R) flowed from the USec’s critique, explaining that Karalasingham’s “sequence of intermediate
advocacy of the United Left Front. The party’s main task was viewed in regimes” was nothing but a sequence of bourgeois governments and
syndicalist terms as the struggle to continue the 21-demands movement represented “a capitulation to the existing level of consciousness of the
through what remained of the JCTUO. As the RCL later explained: “The most backward layers of the anti-UNP masses.” In January 1966, the
LSSP (R) had become an organisation that was manoeuvring at the top to LSSP had joined the SLFP and CP in overtly racialist protests and strikes
pull the ‘left leaders’ into struggle, while denouncing them as traitors against government legislation for the limited official use of the Tamil
before the working class. By means of this policy, they oriented the small language.
following they had within the working class to manoeuvres to ‘push the 17-12. By October 1966, Karalasingham had declared in a polemic
leaders to the left’ and not towards organising the working class and the against Samarakkody that the split with the LSSP had been a mistake and
youth independently for a struggle against the [LSSP and CP] was advocating for a return to the LSSP. Only Wije Dias and one other
leaders.”[41] Shakthi group member voted against Karalasingham’s proposal. Others,
17-9. Dissatisfaction among student youth sympathetic to the LSSP (R) beguiled by Karalasingham’s camouflage of his manoeuvre as an “entry”
increased markedly after the party’s two parliamentarians—Samarakkody into the LSSP, initially voted in favour. Rapidly, however, the Shakthi
and Meryl Fernando—ignored Political Bureau directions and supported a group split after its left wing, led by Anura Ekanayake, Keerthi Balasuriya
right-wing amendment to the Throne Speech in December 1964. The and Nanda Wickremasinghe, established contact with SLL Political
amendment, which relied for its success on the backing of the LSSP (R) Committee member Tony Banda, who was in Sri Lanka at the time. They
MPs, was in effect a vote of no confidence and brought down the accepted Banda’s advice not to enter the LSSP, were put in contact with
SLFP-LSSP government. The vote by Samarakkody and Fernando led to Spike and were able to read his documents for the first time. They
a collapse of support for the LSSP (R) in the March 1965 election and the consolidated a group, including Dias, that systematically studied the
loss of both its seats. The UNP won the election and formed a seven-party documents of the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism in 1953 and 1961–63.
coalition, including the MEP and the Federal Party. In this context, a layer 17-13. Initially under the guidance of Tony Banda, the group began
of students hostile to the actions of the LSSP (R) leadership formed a publishing Virodhaya and intervening in the struggles of the working
heterogeneous grouping, broadly supportive of Trotskyism, and began class. Spike’s interventions inside the LSSP (R) served to further clarify
publishing the Shakthi newspaper in November 1965. Its leaders were, or the role of Pabloism. During Ernest Mandel’s visit to Colombo in
had been, prominent in student politics at Peradeniya university. The February 1967, Spike used a membership meeting to challenge the USec
Shakthi group led a protest against the Vietnam War and a week-long leader. “I make the charge that the leadership of the FI has been directly
student strike in December 1965 to demand improved conditions that was responsible for the degeneration and ultimate debacle of the LSSP, and
violently suppressed by police. Wije Dias and several others were moreover, that the degeneration had its origin in the leadership of the FI
suspended, a former student leader was sacked from his job, and four itself, which included members of the LSSP.” Within weeks, at Mandel’s
students were tried on trumped-up charges of attempting to murder a instigation, the LSSP (R) launched an “investigation” into a Young

Socialisteditorial written by Spike six months earlier, condemning Castro competence of the ICFI, acquired through its consistent struggle for the
for his rabid attack on the Fourth International at the Tri-Continental program and method of the Fourth International, to meet the new
Conference. Spike launched a spirited defence, declaring that LSSP (R) challenges of building the Fourth International as the centralised
leader Bala Tampoe and the Central Committee were accusing him of proletarian leadership. This Congress dedicates firmly to the task of
“lese-majeste against Fidel Castro for presuming to doubt his building the party of the proletarian revolution in Ceylon as a section of
revolutionary bone fides and criticise him.” In answer he declared: “But I the ICFI in an intransigent struggle against all forms of revisionism and
plead in extenuation that I did criticise Castro not as an ordinary declares that this task is inseparably bound up with active intervention in
individual who is but a cipher in comparison with the ‘Great Cuban the class struggle to the maximum possible extent in every place and
Leader’ but as an individual who is proud to be a member of the Fourth under all circumstances.”
International, the world party of socialist revolution which was founded To be continued
by Leon Trotsky ... I have dared to criticise Castro for trying to deceive Footnotes:
and disorient the international working class and indirectly instigating a 35. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Four (London: New Park,
witch-hunt of Trotskyists.” At the April 1968 LSSP (R) Congress, Spike 1974), p. 225.
moved a resolution calling for a complete break from the revisionist 36. Gerry Healy, “Ceylon, the Great Betrayal,” Trotskyism Versus
politics of the United Secretariat, the dissolution of the Central Committee Revisionism, Volume Four, pp. 233–4.
and the establishment of one that would immediately establish relations 37. “The Newsletter,” cited in Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutionary
with the ICFI. Shortly afterwards, Spike broke from the LSSP (R) and Idealism and Parliamentary Politics (Colombo: Social Scientists’
publicly condemned the politics of Pabloism. Association, 1998), p. 261.
17-14. The lessons of the Third Congress of the ICFI in 1966 were 38. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Four, p. 241.
critical in the education of the Virodhaya group members. The congress 39. Ibid., p. 235.
took place in the wake of the SWP’s reunification, in difficult conditions 40. Ibid., p. 255.
in which Pabloism had liquidated most sections of the Fourth 41. Revolutionary Communist League, “The April Crisis and Party
International. Adapting to this situation, the draft resolution declared that History,” internal resolution adopted at the 1972 conference of the RCL,
the Fourth International itself had been destroyed and had to be p. 20.
“reconstructed.” During the congress, the British SLL insisted that the
continuity of the Fourth International had been preserved through the
political and theoretical struggle of the ICFI against Pabloism and that the To contact the WSWS and the
lessons of that struggle were critical to resolving the crisis of Socialist Equality Party visit:
revolutionary proletarian leadership. The amended document declared:
“The historical continuity of the Fourth International was ensured by the
International Committee, for it alone was able to carry out the theoretical
and practical fight against revisionism, indispensable for the building of
the revolutionary international.” Two groupings—Voix Ouvrière from
France and James Robertson’s Spartacist tendency from the US—that had
been invited to determine whether political collaboration with them was
possible, denigrated the struggle against Pabloite opportunism. Robertson
flatly opposed “the notion that the present crisis of capitalism is so sharp
and deep that Trotskyist revisionism is needed to tame the workers, in a
way comparable to the degeneration of the Second and Third
Internationals.” Robertson declared that this constituted “an enormous
overestimation of our present significance”, rejecting the lessons of the
LSSP’s betrayal just two years earlier. He quit the congress and formed
the Spartacist tendency, which has always been characterised by its deep
hostility to the ICFI.
17-15. The founding congress of the RCL took place on June 16–17,
1968. In the main report to the congress, Balasuriya drew out the crucial
lessons of the Third Congress of the ICFI and their significance for the
establishment of the RCL. The key issue that emerged during the
discussion concerned the continuity of the struggle for Trotskyism. In
opposition to a tendency that viewed the congress as the unification of a
national Sri Lankan revolutionary current that traced its history through
the LSSP, LSSP (R) and Shakthi with the ICFI, Balasuriya insisted that
the continuity of Trotskyism lay in the ICFI’s struggles against Pabloism.
The founding of the RCL as a section of the ICFI could only take place on
the basis of the lessons of the splits of 1953 and 1961–63 and in a
fundamental break from the opportunist politics of the LSSP, LSSP (R)
and also the Shakthi group.
17-16. The congress unanimously adopted a resolution that declared:
“This Congress declares its full agreement with the resolution
‘Rebuilding the Fourth International’ that was adopted by the Third
Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) held in April 1966. This Congress expresses complete faith in the


Lanka)—Part 8
3 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and from the SLFP.”
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 18-4. The response of Keerthi Balasuriya and the RCL provides a
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in classic example of how a Marxist party makes a principled correction.
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. The party leadership first initiated an exhaustive inner party discussion of
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Banda’s correspondence and the political implications of the error. In a
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 statement published in July 1970 correcting the error, the RCL explained:
“A party capable of taking power can be built only in opposition to the
18. The RCL’s struggle against petty-bourgeois radicalism LSSP-CP leaders. Without a struggle against the coalition perspective of
18-1. The founding of the RCL took place at the onset of a wave of the LSSP-CP leaders on the basis of a perspective of a workers’ and
revolutionary struggles of the international working class that convulsed peasants’ government, we cannot mobilise the working class
much of the world from 1968 to 1975. The tumultuous May–June strike independently. To force the Samasamajist and Stalinist leaders to break
movement in France and the 1968 “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia from the coalition government and the coalition front is the form that the
were followed by a succession of upheavals including the 1969 “hot fight for class independence of the working class takes.”
summer” in Italy, the 1974 British miners’ strike that brought down the 18-5. The RCL’s new tactical orientation was not to encourage illusions
Heath government and the collapse of the fascist regimes in Portugal and in the LSSP and CP but was the political means for exposing their class
Greece. These struggles were a product of the economic turmoil produced collaborationist politics as part of the independent mobilisation of the
by the end of the post-war boom and the breakup of the Bretton Woods working class and rural masses for the seizure of power. As the
monetary system signalled by the termination of US dollar-gold Transitional Program of the Fourth International stated: “Of all the parties
convertibility in August 1971. The chief role in betraying these and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and
revolutionary movements was played by the social democratic, Stalinist speak in their name we demand that they break politically from the
and trade union bureaucracies. However, as the ICFI had rightly bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for a workers’ and
recognised from the LSSP’s earlier betrayal in 1964, the various Pabloite farmers’ government. On this road we promise them full support against
organisations proved to be a vital secondary prop for capitalism in capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop our
blocking a political struggle by the working class against the treachery of agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion
its old parties and organisations. form the program for a workers’ and farmers’ government’.”[42]
18-2. In Sri Lanka, the capitalist class depended directly on the LSSP, 18-6. However, the RCL did not stop at correcting the immediate
which provided the vital “Trotskyist” camouflage for the second mistake. As a Marxist, Balasuriya understood that this error had to be the
Bandaranaike government that took power after a landslide election product of considerable political pressures being brought to bear on the
victory in May 1970 and ruled until its ignominious defeat in 1977. LSSP party—particularly via the agencies of petty-bourgeois radicalism and
leaders N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene all opportunism. The RCL statement declared that it was necessary to grasp
became ministers. Throughout this period, the LSSP (R) and its various “the roots of this error because the same hostile class pressure that acted
fragments—following their Pabloite counterparts internationally—assisted on the RCL can emerge in another form in other circumstances.” In the
in propping up the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition government in the face of wake of the discussion, Balasuriya turned to a book-length critique of the
mounting working class opposition by promoting, in various guises, a party that was the epitome of middle-class radicalism—the JVP. The
renewal of the United Left Front and the illusion that the LSSP and CP program of the JVP drew from the fashionable theories of the day—the
could be pressured to defend workers’ interests. peasant guerrillaism of Castroism and Maoism, which were also being
18-3. In the 1970 election, amid overwhelming hostility in the working promoted by the Pabloites. In subjecting the JVP to detailed critical
class to the previous UNP government, the RCL called for a critical vote examination, Balasuriya deepened the class differentiation of the RCL
for the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. This serious tactical error was criticised from radical Sinhala populism and from all those parties, including the
by Michael Banda in a letter to the RCL, explaining that the policy was LSSP and LSSP (R) that adapted to it.
“an unwarranted concession to the reformists and the radical 18-7. In the preface to his book, Balasuriya declared: “Many elements,
bourgeoisie.” He continued: “Certainly, now the task must be not to open claiming to base themselves on the experiences of Mao Zedong and the
the door for another coalition (how many more coalitions do we need!) Chinese revolution, try to reduce the question of the revolution simply to
but to reject any support to the SLFP and to attempt to free the working one of carrying out, in one way or the other, a protracted ‘peoples war’ or
class from the capitalist trap by demanding the LSSP-CP leaders to break some other form of armed struggle. These attempts have nothing in

common with Marxist positions on revolution. The question of revolution party explained to workers that they had a political responsibility to
cannot even be posed without a genuinely objective evaluation of the defend the rural masses as part of the process of forging an alliance with
inter-relationships between the classes and their dynamics ... The Marxist the peasantry against the capitalist state. The RCL warned that the attacks
conception that emphasises that the working class cannot come to power on the rural youth foreshadowed attacks on the working class itself. The
by peaceful means has nothing in common with the stupid formula that RCL’s demand to “Free the political prisoners” became one of the
victory is assured by simply getting armed. Anyone with the slightest slogans raised by workers in the developing strike movement in the
respect for the experience of the revolutions where the working class, mid-1970s. After his release in 1978, JVP leader Wijeweera visited the
even though it had arms in hand, was beaten and crushed by the RCL headquarters to personally thank the party for its campaign.
bourgeoisie, will not advocate such conceptions.”[43] 18-13. One aspect of the RCL’s defence campaign deserves particular
18-8. As Balasuriya explained, the JVP—like Castro, Guevara and mention. The party intervened vigorously to defend the democratic rights
Mao—was organically hostile to the working class and rooted in of artists threatened under the emergency powers imposed in the wake of
reactionary nationalism. In the JVP’s distorted terminology, the the JVP uprising. The RCL’s campaign and its publication of reviews of
“proletariat” referred to the oppressed layers of the peasantry. The new drama, cinema and literature attracted a broad audience, especially
organisation belittled the economic struggles of workers as “struggles for among youth. The RCL translated Trotsky’s seminal pamphlet, Culture
cups of porridge” that distracted from the “patriotic” struggle against and Socialism, and elaborated a Marxist approach to the arts that
imperialism. Modelling itself on Castro, the JVP declared that “an contradicted the dominant bourgeois ideologies as well as theories based
uprising staged by a group of patriots could undermine the power of the on Stalinist “social realism.” So influential were the RCL’s writings that
ruling class.” Like the Stalinists, the JVP fostered dangerous illusions in a leading academic, Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra, felt impelled in
the progressive nature of the national bourgeoisie. In what amounted to a 1985 to publicly attack the party’s work. In response, Keerthi Balasuriya,
repetition of Stalin’s formula for the 1925–27 Chinese revolution, it in collaboration with Suchiratha Gamlath, then an RCL Central
declared that “anti-imperialist hatred among all social classes” is “pooled Committee member, wrote a book elaborating the historical materialist
together” and “amounts to patriotism.” foundations of Marxist literary criticism. Piyaseeli Wijegunasinghe
18-9. From the outset, the JVP’s propaganda had a communal contributed to this theoretical development through many reviews in the
character: patriotism meant Sinhala patriotism; the anti-imperialist party’s press and three books—the last one directed against Professor
struggle included a fight against “Indian expansionism” and “privileged” Gamlath who left the RCL in 1989 and bitterly attacked the party and
Tamil-speaking plantation workers were declared the enemy of Sinhala Marxism.
workers. Balasuriya prophetically warned: “In a period where British 18-14. The period during and immediately after the April 1971 uprising
imperialism and the Lankan bourgeoisie are driven by their own class generated considerable political difficulties inside the party. Several
interests to devastate the conditions of the plantation workers, petty leading RCL members deserted the movement, including Anura
bourgeois hostility to the same workers turns into a weapon in the hands Ekanayake who had helped win Balasuriya to Trotskyism. As he had done
of monopoly capitalism. This racism is one that leads to fascism. The JVP in relation to the earlier tactical error, Balasuriya responded to the crisis
is creating an anti-working class movement in Lanka which could well be by seeking to clarify its political roots. In order to understand the
utilised in the future by a fascist movement.” JVP leader Rohana renegacy of Ekanayake and others, he turned to an examination, from the
Wijeweera responded to the book’s publication by threatening to hang standpoint of the struggle against Pabloite opportunism, of the history of
Balasuriya if the JVP came to power. the RCL and the various layers that had forged it. Like his previous
18-10. The RCL’s principled correction of its tactical error was the analysis of the JVP, this internal party history was to deepen the RCL’s
essential preparation for the huge political tests that lay ahead. Within break from all forms of middle-class radicalism.
months, the JVP put into practice its theory that “an uprising staged by a 18-15. When he went to Britain in 1972, Balasuriya presented an
group of patriots could undermine the power of the ruling class.” In April English translation of this analysis, “The April Crisis and Party History,”
1971, its cadre launched a series of attacks on police stations in the south to SLL leader Gerry Healy and sought his opinion. By 1972, however, the
of the island. The Bandaranaike government, with the full support of the SLL was in the process of abandoning its previous struggle against
LSSP and CP, responded with a ferocious campaign of state repression. Pabloism. Far from providing sympathetic advice to the 23-year-old
More than 15,000 rural youth were killed by the army and police and over Trotskyist leader, as would have been the case in the past, Healy
30,000 detained. A state of emergency was proclaimed and draconian new dismissed the document, declaring that the RCL needed a perspective not
legislation passed establishing special courts to try the JVP leaders on a history. In a letter to an RCL member in Britain, Balasuriya replied to
conspiracy charges. this false counter-position of history to perspective: “This document is not
18-11. Occurring just three years after the formation of the a substitute for a perspectives document, but a precondition for it. We
Revolutionary Communist League, the period was a baptism of fire for have adopted a perspectives document which we will send you as soon as
the RCL. Despite its fundamental political differences with the JVP, the the translation is completed. But to draft a perspectives document we
RCL took a principled stand in opposition to the murderous campaign of must first understand our relationship to the past struggles of the working
state repression against the JVP and rural youth. As a result, the class and of the Marxist movement. Without defining and understanding
government banned the RCL’s publications and the party was forced this relationship it will not be possible to grasp the role we have to play in
underground. It continued its political activities in defiance of the the coming class battles. This is the importance of history.”[44]
emergency regulations and paid a terrible price. Two RCL 18-16. In a sign of the growing political maturity of the RCL leadership,
members—Central Committee member Lakshman Weerakoon and L.G. Balasuriya ignored Healy’s comments and presented two documents—on
Gunadasa—were arrested and killed in police custody. party history and on perspectives—to the RCL’s 1972 congress. Over the
18-12. The RCL, however, was not destroyed by the ordeal, but next four years, he deepened the party’s differentiation from the various
emerged with its political stature considerably enhanced. In conditions of representatives of Pabloite politics in Sri Lanka—with lengthy series in the
illegality, it sought to mobilise the working class against the state RCL’s newspapers against the politics of Samarakkody, Bala Tampoe
repression. As restrictions were eased, the RCL conducted an island-wide and one of Samarakkody’s associates, Tulsiri Andradi. Samarakkody
campaign in defence of the detained rural youth. Based on the broke from LSSP (R) in 1968, and his group joined with the Spartacist
fundamental conceptions of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the tendency, which shared his centrist politics and deep hostility to the ICFI.

Under Bala Tampoe, who headed the Ceylon Mercantile Union, the LSSP pointing out that this adulation of Maoism could only mislead workers
(R) became an adjunct of his union and a mouthpiece for syndicalism. It, and youth throughout Asia. The subsequent issue of the Fourth
nonetheless, continued to be recognised by USec as its official section in International published a small note declaring that the editorial had been
Sri Lanka until 1981. the “personal opinion” of Mike Banda, but presented no critique of the
views expressed. The SLL’s live-and-let-live attitude to Banda’s
19. The political degeneration of the British SLL pro-Maoist positions marked a serious retreat from the principled defence
19-1. The disagreement between Balasuriya and Healy over the of the Theory of Permanent Revolution during 1961–63 against the SWP
significance of the RCL’s history was symptomatic of a broader and an adaptation to the glorification of the “armed struggle” of Castro,
international process. The new sections of the ICFI—the Workers League Mao and Ho Chi Minh by the Pabloites.
in the US, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter in Germany in September 19-6. The SLL’s shift away from the Theory of Permanent Revolution
1971 and the Socialist Labour League in Australia in November was to have a serious impact of the political work of RCL, as a section of
1972—were formed on the basis of the lessons of the 1953 and 1961–63 the ICFI based in a backward capitalist country. Sharp differences
splits. At the same time, however, the SLL was turning away from the between the SLL and the RCL emerged in 1971 over the Indo-Pakistan
principles for which it had previously fought in the 1950s and early war. The SLL published a statement in the name of the IC giving “critical
1960s. support” to the Indian army intervention into East Pakistan in the name of
19-2. In the aftermath of the ICFI’s Third Congress in 1966, the French supporting of the Bangladesh liberation movement. The RCL statement,
section of the ICFI, the Organisation Communiste Internationale (OCI), by contrast, declared that “the task of the proletariat is not that of
which had supported the SLL at the time, began raising again the need to supporting any one of the warring factions of the bourgeoisie, but that of
“reconstruct” the Fourth International. Behind this phrase was an utilising each and every conflict in the camp of the class enemy for the
adaptation by the OCI to centrist outfits that denied the fundamental seizure of power with the perspective of setting up a federated socialist
importance of the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism. The SLL opposed the republic which alone would be able to satisfy the social and national
OCI, but was coming under similar class pressures. In his 1966 document aspirations of the millions of toilers in the subcontinent.”[47]
“Problems of the Fourth International”, Gerry Healy argued that the 19-7. Still working under conditions of state repression, the RCL only
central task of the SLL was to build a strong political party in Britain that learned of the IC statement proclaiming “critical support” a week after
would “inspire” revolutionists to do likewise in other countries around the drafting its statement opposing the Indian military intervention.
world. This nationalist conception marked a significant retreat from the Balasuriya immediately wrote to the ICFI secretary Cliff Slaughter
internationalism underpinning the building of the Fourth International: stating: “It is not possible to support the national liberation struggle of the
that national sections could only be constructed as part of the international Bengali people and the voluntary unification of India on socialist
struggle of the world party against all forms of national opportunism. foundations without opposing the Indo-Pakistan war. Without opposing
19-3. The SLL’s turn away from the struggle against Pabloism led to a the war from within India and Pakistan, it is completely absurd to talk
weakening of its defence of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. about a unified socialist India which alone can safeguard the right of
As David North later wrote: “In the late 1960s, [Mike] Banda’s writings self-determination of the many nations of the Indian subcontinent.”[48]
on Vietnam, China and the revolutionary movements in the backward Balasuriya pointed out that the reason for the Indian military intervention
countries in general rejected two central tenets of the theory of permanent was precisely to suppress a revolutionary struggle to unify East and West
revolution: (1) that the democratic revolution in the backward countries Bengal and to uphold the reactionary state system established in 1947–48.
can be completed only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and (2) 19-8. Having stated the RCL’s firm opposition to the IC stance,
that the establishment of a socialist society is inconceivable without the Balasuriya accepted the political authority of the ICFI and sought a
worldwide overthrow of capitalism by the international proletariat. discussion of the issues involved. After explaining that the RCL had
Banda’s writings assumed the character of an apology for the colonial withdrawn its own statement, he wrote: “It need not be stated that it is
bourgeoisie and an acceptance of the Stalinist two-stage theory of difficult to defend the IC statement. Nevertheless clarity inside the
revolution.”[45] international is more important than anything else for it is impossible for
19-4. Writing in the Newsletter in January 1967, Banda uncritically us to build a national section without fighting to build the
hailed Mao’s so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, declaring: international.”[49] Far from opening up an international discussion,
“The Mao leadership with the support of the Red Guards is fighting however, the SLL did not circulate the RCL’s letter to other sections of
against this group under the banner of ‘egalitarianism’. They are fighting the ICFI and increasingly set out to isolate the RCL.
against privilege, against autocratic powers, for democracy in China; for 19-9. The SLL’s refusal to discuss the political issues surrounding the
the right to criticise and to act on the criticisms; the right to tell the Indo-Pakistan war was part of a broader turn away from the program of
judges, the police and the ministers what the people really think about Trotskyism. In November 1971, the SLL had announced a split with the
their policies and to throw them out if they don’t mend their ways.”[46] French OCI, the only other longstanding section of the ICFI. While the
Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 had nothing to do SLL’s characterisation of the OCI and its political line as centrist was
with egalitarianism, or for that matter, culture or the proletariat. He had correct, the SLL made no attempt to clarify the underlying political issues
mobilised the Red Guards as part of his factional struggle within the and instead insisted that the split had taken place over “Marxist theory.”
Chinese Communist Party leadership. As soon as workers became David North later wrote: “The precipitous split with the OCI in the
involved, most notably with the appearance of an insurrectionary uprising autumn of 1971 provided the occasion for [Cliff] Slaughter to argue that
in Shanghai, Mao, who was always fearful of any independent movement ‘the experience of building the revolutionary party in Britain’ had
of the proletariat, rapidly turned to the military to bring the protest demonstrated ‘that a thoroughgoing and difficult struggle against idealist
movement under control. ways of thinking was necessary which went much deeper than questions
19-5. In an editorial in the Fourth International in February 1968 of agreement on program and policy’. ... Trotsky had always insisted that
entitled “The Vietnamese Revolution and the Fourth International”, the program, through which Marxist theory finds its expression, builds the
Banda eulogised the “protracted people’s war” being waged by Ho Chi revolutionary party. But Slaughter, setting theory up against the program,
Minh in Vietnam and hailed Mao as “the foremost exponent of ‘guerrilla called into question both the validity and viability of the parties produced
struggle’ today.” The Virodhaya group in Sri Lanka wrote to the SLL by the struggle for the Trotskyist program.”[50]

19-10. The SLL’s political backsliding was to be expressed in the
transformation of the SLL into the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP)
in November 1973. The WRP was founded without any discussion in the
ICFI or any of the necessary programmatic clarification and on the basis
of a national tactic orientated to the developing mass anti-Tory movement
in Britain. The WRP’s subsequent adaptation to the Labour and trade
union bureaucracy in Britain was accompanied by a complete
abandonment of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and its betrayal of
the fundamental principles of Trotskyism.
To be continued
Footnotes:
42. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), p. 134.
43. Keerthi Balasuriya, Politics and the Class Nature of the JVP (in
Sinhalese) December 1970.
44. Fourth International, Volume 14, No 1, March 1987, p. 47.
45. The Heritage We Defend, p. 423.
46. Ibid., p. 425.
47. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 1, March 1987, p. 37.
48. Ibid., p. 42.
49. Ibid., p. 43.
50. David North, Gerry Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth
International, (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), p.58–59.



Lanka)—Part 9
4 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and overwhelming majority in the 1972 Constituent Assembly to arbitrarily
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) extend its term of office by two years to 1977. It kept in place the state of
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in emergency, imposed during the JVP uprising, and used the emergency
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. regulations to muzzle the press and political opponents. Amid growing
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 differences over economic policy, Bandaranaike dismissed the LSSP
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 ministers in 1975 and began to take the first steps towards opening up the
island to foreign investment.
20. The collapse of the second coalition government 20-5. The period from the expulsion of the LSSP from the government
20-1. In the wake of the 1971 JVP uprising, the SLFP-LSSP-CP in September 1975 to its devastating electoral defeat in July 1977 was one
government confronted a mounting economic and political crisis and of acute political crisis for the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie—part of the
responded by widening state repression and inflaming Sinhala revolutionary upheavals that had taken place internationally since 1968.
communalism. In 1972, Constitutional Affairs Minister Colvin R. de Bandaranaike’s austerity policies produced a mounting strike wave in
Silva, who in 1956 had opposed the “Sinhala Only” policy, played the which the RCL played an increasingly prominent role. Concerned at the
central role in devising a new constitution that formally enshrined RCL’s influence, the government publicly attacked the party in
Buddhism as the state religion and Sinhala as the only official language. parliament. The climax came in late 1976. In November, widespread
Discriminatory measures were enacted against Tamils in public sector student demonstrations over the shooting of a student at Peradeniya
employment and for university entrance. The Tamil parties—the Federal university were joined by tens of thousands of workers. From December
Party, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress and the main plantation workers’ 1976, a general strike movement began with a stoppage in the Ratmalana
organisation, the Ceylon Workers’ Congress—bitterly opposed the new railway workshops that quickly spread throughout the railways. The
constitution and formed the Tamil United Front (TUF), which was government banned the strike but this only fuelled further stoppages by
transformed in 1975 into the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). other public sector workers. For weeks, the fate of the Bandaranaike
20-2. The oil shocks and global recession of 1973–74 impacted heavily government hung in the balance.
on Sri Lanka. Soaring commodity prices, particularly for oil and food 20-6. The survival of bourgeois rule in the face of this determined
imports, produced an acute foreign exchange crisis. Finance Minister offensive by the working class rested on the LSSP, CP and LSSP (R)
N.M. Perera extended national economic regulation to include strict leaders who blocked any development of the mass movement into a
controls on food imports, a state monopoly of rice transport, and a wage struggle for power. The CP remained in the government and supported
freeze. These policies produced acute economic hardship among the police state measures against strikers, only leaving the ruling coalition in
working class and rural masses. In the plantations, unemployment, February 1977 after the strikes were crushed. The LSSP leaders declared
underemployment and soaring prices led to extreme poverty and hundreds that the strike movement was “non-political” and refused to support the
of deaths by starvation. Bandaranaike reacted by accelerating the forced striking workers or make any call for the bringing down of the
repatriation of plantation workers through an agreement with Indian Bandaranaike government. The Ceylon Mercantile Union, under LSSP
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1974. Widespread hostility to the (R) leader Bala Tampoe, refused to take part in the strike and opposed the
coalition government produced a rising tide of working-class militancy. RCL’s efforts to mobilise CMU members.
20-3. The clarification of the RCL’s political line in 1970 proved 20-7. The LSSP (R) and its various breakaway groups played the critical
critical for the party’s interventions in the developing mass movement. Its role in attacking the RCL’s demand for the LSSP and CP to fight for a
demand that the LSSP and CP break from the SLFP and fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies. Tulsiri
workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies met up with the Andradi criticised the RCL for creating illusions in the reformist
sentiments of significant layers of workers who were deeply hostile to the parties—the LSSP and the CP—by demanding they take power. The RCL’s
coalition government. The party was able to build significant trade union demand, however, was not aimed at promoting these parties, but rather at
factions in the Ratmalana railway workshops, the central bank, the breaking their grip over socialist-minded layers of the working class who
government press, the state-owned Thulhiriya textile factory, and, still grudgingly looked to the LSSP and CP for leadership. Andradi’s
reflecting the RCL’s fight to unify Sinhala and Tamil workers, the left-sounding denunciation was in fact an evasion of the essential political
Ceynor factory on the Jaffna peninsula. task of exposing the LSSP and CP and thus left workers in the hands of
20-4. As the government’s crisis worsened, Bandaranaike resorted to these parties. The betrayal of this mass movement by the LSSP, CP and
anti-democratic methods. The SLFP-led government had exploited its LSSP (R) paved the way for the UNP to return to power. At the July 1977

election, the coalition parties suffered a crushing defeat: the UNP won reforms then came into headlong collision with the working class and
140 of the 168 seats, the SLFP retained just 8 seats, and the LSSP and CP turned to authoritarian methods to suppress dissent. In Pakistan and India,
lost all their seats. the various Stalinist parties played the critical role in preventing the
20-8. As the RCL was deepening its political fight against the old working class from challenging these supposedly left regimes, thereby
leaderships in the Sri Lankan working class, the WRP was turning away enabling the bourgeoisie to regain the initiative. In the space of five
from such a struggle in Britain. The bringing down of the Heath months in 1977, Bhutto, Gandhi and Bandaranaike all fell from power.
government in Britain in 1974 as the result of a determined strike by Bourgeois politics then shifted sharply right, although in the case of Indira
British miners led to a minority Labour government. Having founded the Gandhi, she herself came to embody this shift when restored to power in
party the year before on little more than militant working-class 1980. In Pakistan, Bhutto was ousted in an army coup led by General
anti-Toryism, the WRP faced a political crisis and the loss of hundreds of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and encouraged by Washington. Bhutto, Gandhi
members as it now confronted the need to combat residual illusions of and Bandaranaike left a reactionary legacy—their “left” populism, laden as
workers in social democracy. These illusions were articulated by an it was with chauvinism, and appeals to national and religio-communal
unprincipled, right-wing faction headed by Alan Thornett, a Central identities, sowed the seeds for a qualitative escalation of
Committee member and leading trade unionist. It argued that the Labour ethno-communalist politics across South Asia in the 1980s.
government would come into conflict with the bourgeoisie. Rather than
carry out a struggle to clarify the class nature of Labourism for its 21. The UNP government and the descent into war
members and through them the working class, the WRP expelled the 21-1. The advent of the UNP government in Sri Lanka was part of
Thornett group without political discussion. The WRP’s abandonment of broader global economic and political processes. Following the defeat of
the patient fight to politically educate workers was signalled by its call in the wave of revolutionary struggles in the period of 1968–1975, the ruling
July 1975 for the bringing down of the Labour government in conditions classes launched a counteroffensive against the working class, marked
where the Labour Party still had the allegiance of most workers and the politically by the coming to power of the Thatcher government in Britain
revolutionary party was in no position to offer an alternative. Behind this in 1979 and the Reagan administration in the US in 1980. The following
left-sounding ultimatum, the WRP was relinquishing the political struggle year Reagan, with the complicity of the AFL-CIO, smashed the PATCO
against the Labour leadership and adapting to a section of the trade union strike by dismissing 11,000 air traffic controllers. Monetarist, pro-market
bureaucracy. policies replaced Keynesian economic regulation as the new benchmark
20-9. The WRP also attempted to foist a similar stance on the RCL. In a for governments around the world. Beginning in East and South East
letter to Balasuriya in September 1975, Mike Banda declared: “I am Asia, a turn was made towards the creation of cheap labour platforms.
afraid that the propagandist tail is wagging the Marxist dog again. This is Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, which were to become
reflected in your press where a lot of space is given to exposing the the “Asian Tigers” of the 1980s, all offered incentives to foreign investors
revisionists (correctly) but not enough is being done to develop, to to take advantage of their low-wage labour. In China, Deng Xiaoping
concretise the abstractions—through a struggle for power.” Banda called announced his openly pro-market program in 1978.
on the RCL to drop its demands on the LSSP and CP, warning that the 21-2. In adopting these policies in Sri Lanka, the UNP government drew
party would “end up capitulating to the centrists”, and to call for the definite conclusions from the 1975–77 upheaval provoked by
bringing down of the SLFP government. The RCL persisted with its Bandaranaike’s tentative turn to a free market agenda. As he began to
exposure of the LSSP and CP through the demand that they fight for a encourage foreign investment, cut social spending and carry out
workers’ government. Moreover, the RCL’s so-called “propagandism”— privatisations, Prime Minister J.R. Jayewardene prepared for war against
Balasuriya’s polemics against the various Pabloite groups, including his the working class by strengthening the state apparatus and raising
book-length reply to Andradi in 1975 entitled: In Defence of the Fourth communal tensions to fever pitch to shore up his own social base and
International: A Reply to an anti-Trotskyist Charlatan—were the essential divide working people. In 1978, the UNP used its overwhelming
preparation for the RCL’s intervention into the working class. parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution, establishing an
20-10. The upheavals of 1975–77 proved to be a decisive political test. executive presidency with sweeping anti-democratic powers, and to install
Based on the 1970 clarification of its political line, the RCL emerged with Jayewardene as president. In July 1979, the government rammed through
its standing greatly enhanced among class conscious workers. It had been the Prevention of Terrorism Act giving the police powers of arrest and
the only party that fought to mobilise the working class against the imprisonment without trial.
Bandaranaike government on a socialist program. All the fragments of the 21-3. While the UNP had promised during the election campaign to
LSSP (R) led by Bala Tampoe, Samarakkody and Andradi had been address Tamil grievances, Jayewardene rapidly turned to anti-Tamil
found wanting and would all but vanish from Sri Lankan politics in the racialism. In 1976, the TULF had adopted the Vaddukodai resolution
next few years. Their place was taken by the Nava Sama Samaja Party calling for a separate Tamil state of Eelam consisting of the northern and
(NSSP) formed in 1978 by ex-LSSP members. The NSSP founders had eastern provinces of the island. Anger among Tamil youth over the
supported the 1964 betrayal, the second coalition government and its discrimination they faced had led to the formation of various small armed
communal policies, remained in the LSSP throughout the strike wave and groups. Jayewardene used a minor attack on police in August 1977 to
only left after the 1977 electoral rout. The NSSP, as its name implied, was order the army into Jaffna and encouraged a vicious pogrom elsewhere.
simply the old opportunist Samasamajism with a new face. It continued The government denounced the TULF, which insisted that its electoral
the LSSP’s politics of class collaboration and coalitionism, and, quite successes gave it a mandate to negotiate a separate Eelam. In parliament,
appropriately, became the Sri Lankan section of the Pabloite United the prime minister provocatively declared: “If you want a fight, there will
Secretariat in 1981. be a fight.” Jayewardene had set the pattern for the rapid descent into civil
20-11. The rise and fall of the Bandaranaike government in Sri Lanka war. At each stage, the UNP exploited isolated attacks on police to
found striking parallels elsewhere in South Asia. In the midst of the respond with massive state repression and pogroms against the Tamil
economic crisis of the 1970s, the governments of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in minority.
Pakistan and Indira Gandhi in India sought to bind the working class and 21-4. The RCL consistently campaigned for the withdrawal of the
oppressed toilers to the bourgeoisie through pseudo-socialist rhetoric and security forces from the North and East and to unite the working class.
populist nationalism. Both governments initially enacted very limited The party insisted that the proletariat was the only social force capable of

resolving the outstanding democratic tasks and preventing a rapid slide called for the withdrawal of troops sent to the island’s North and would
into civil war. In the climate of communal reaction created by the UNP continue to do so throughout the war. Apart from the Tamil bourgeois
and supported by the SLFP, LSSP and CP, the RCL’s stand required parties, the RCL was alone in opposing the chauvinist 1972 constitution.
considerable courage. In 1979, leading RCL member R.P. Piyadasa was When the RCL faction in the government press union proposed a motion,
brutally murdered for opposing the government’s policies by which was passed, opposing the constitution, LSSP officials carried out a
UNP-organised thugs working with the police. witch-hunt against party supporters.
21-5. Opposition to the UNP government’s program of privatisation 22-2. Amid the growing radicalisation of Tamil youth, the RCL
and restructuring reached a high point in July 1980 when a broad general declared in June 1972: “We Marxists recognise the right of the Tamil
strike movement for higher pay erupted. President Jayewardene nation to self-determination. At the same time, we emphasise that this
immediately declared the strike illegal and threatened to sack anyone who right can only be won by mobilising the Sinhalese and Tamil workers for
joined it. The LSSP and CP declared the strike “non-political” and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government based on
refused to challenge the UNP government’s emergency powers or to call socialist policies and recognising this very same right.”[51] In line with
for it to be brought down. LSSP (R) leader Bala Tampoe did not call his Lenin’s writings on the national question, the RCL was not advocating a
CMU out on strike. The NSSP declared that the strike was simply a pay separate Tamil state, but rather defending the right of Tamils to do so. The
dispute and bitterly attacked the RCL campaign to transform it into a policy was a means of exposing the duplicity of bourgeois Tamil
political movement against the government. As a result of the treachery of politicians and winning Tamil workers and youth to a socialist perspective
these leaderships, the UNP government was able to sack 100,000 public for Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent as a whole.
sector workers virtually unopposed, thereby inflicting a devastating defeat 22-3. However, at a meeting of the ICFI in 1972, the SLL leadership
on the working class. vehemently opposed the RCL’s stance. Banda argued that support for the
21-6. The defeat of the 1980 General Strike—the last major strike by the Tamils’ right to self-determination would help the plans of the
Sri Lankan working class—opened the door to full-scale civil war. The imperialists to carve up the island. Like his support for the Indian military
UNP’s response to any political challenge or crisis was to resort to intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, Banda’s opposition to the RCL was
anti-Tamil provocations that culminated in horrific pogroms in July 1983. based on accepting the legitimacy of the so-called independent nation
After the killing of 13 soldiers by Tamil militants, the UNP government states established by imperialism in South Asia in 1947–48. Balasuriya
deliberately inflamed communal sentiment by bringing the bodies to later explained: “The position of the WRP inexorably leads to complete
Colombo. The following day anti-Tamil violence, in which UNP thugs capitulation to the national bourgeoisie and through it to imperialism
were prominent, erupted throughout much of the island and on an because its theory was based entirely on the supposed necessity to keep
unprecedented scale. The homes and shops of Tamils were torched and these bourgeois states intact. And since these state structures, without
hundreds of people were killed. The government and police allowed the exception, are based on the domination of one nationality—whose
rampage to continue unimpeded for four days and imposed draconian bourgeoisie, allied with imperialism, uses brute force to keep the other
censorship to block any news. nationalities in subjugation—the defence of these state structures amounts
21-7. The murderous pogrom marked the beginning of a full-scale civil to the defence of imperialism itself.”[52]
war that was to devastate the country for the next quarter of a century. On 22-4. At that stage, as the Tamil struggle was only in incipient form, the
August 4, in what amounted to a declaration of war, the UNP government RCL reluctantly bowed to the experience and political authority of the
rammed through a constitutional change—the sixth amendment—banning SLL leadership. The RCL continued to staunchly defend the democratic
the advocacy of a separate Eelam and imposing a loyalty oath on all rights of Tamils and fight for the unity of Tamil and Sinhala workers but
public servants. For refusing to take this oath, all TULF parliamentarians was hampered by the fact that it was working throughout most of the
lost their seats. By December 1983, the Jaffna peninsula had been 1970s without an important tactical weapon. The party had to combat the
declared a “war zone.” Outraged by the actions of the UNP government, growing influence of Maoists, whose advocacy of the “armed struggle”
Tamil youth in their thousands flocked to join the ranks of the various was attractive to the radicalised Tamil youth who were hostile to the
armed Tamil groups. TULF’s Gandhian tactics. Like the JVP, the Maoists pointed to the
21-8. In the course of the pogrom, the RCL was targeted for particular treachery of the LSSP ministers in the Bandaranaike government to
attack. The home of Kamkaru Mavatha editor K. Ratnayake was burned denounce Trotskyism. Prior to 1977, however, these armed Tamil groups
to the ground and an attempt to destroy the party print shop was narrowly had marginal political significance and were completely sidelined by the
averted. The RCL defied government censorship. It published a lengthy preceding mass movement of the working class that drew support from
statement indicting the government and opposition parties and calling on Sinhala and Tamil workers on a class basis.
the working class to come to the defence of Tamils. The RCL opposed the 22-5. In 1979, as the Tamil national liberation struggle achieved
war, exposed the complicity of the LSSP, CP and the Indian government, international prominence, the WRP made a 180-degree turn. Banda sent a
and demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East. In letter of apology to the RCL admitting that the WRP had ignored the
May 1984, Ananda Wakkumbura, who was legally responsible for the importance of the national question in Sri Lanka, but provided no
RCL newspapers, was arrested for violating the sixth amendment and held explanation in the letter or subsequently for its belated advocacy of the
by police for two weeks. Confronted by a vigorous RCL campaign, the right to self-determination for Tamils. The WRP’s new line on Sri Lanka
government backed away from prosecuting Wakkumbura. was no more based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution than its
previous one. It had flipped from opposition to the Tamil national
22. The RCL, the WRP and the national question liberation struggle to an uncritical embrace. The WRP’s about-face was
22-1. The RCL’s stance on the national question had, since its bound up with the shift in its class axis following the politically
inception, been based on the principles of proletarian internationalism as unclarified split with Thornett in 1974. In 1976, as the WRP encountered
developed through Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. The party new political problems associated with the international counteroffensive
consistently fought against all forms of nationalism, communalism and of the bourgeoisie, it began to turn to other class forces for support—to the
racism in order to unite workers on a class basis. It courageously opposed Labour and trade union bureaucracy in Britain and to Arab bourgeois
the increasingly blatant forms of official communal discrimination against regimes in the Middle East.
Tamils and defended their democratic rights. As early as 1970, the RCL 22-6. In parallel with its unprincipled relations with the Arab

bourgeoisie, the WRP established connections with the Liberation Tigers 22-10. During 1983–85, the WRP consciously sought to politically
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE was one of the more prominent destroy the Sri Lankan section as part of its broader attacks on the
armed Tamil groups, which included the Tamil Eelam Liberation International Committee. At the height of the anti-Tamil pogrom in July
Organisation (TELO), the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation 1983, the News Line published a comment written by Banda that declared:
Front (EPRLF), Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS) “It is possible and even probable, that the police and the army have used
and later the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). the arbitrary and uncontrolled power granted to them under the emergency
All of the groups had been influenced to one degree or another by laws to kill our comrades and destroy our press.” Writing later, Keerthi
Stalinism and Maoism and, like the TULF, declared that their objective Balasuriya denounced the WRP’s callous indifference to the fate of the
was a socialist Tamil Eelam. The WRP assisted the LTTE’s so-called RCL, explaining: “You did absolutely nothing to mount a campaign in
theoretician Anton Balasingham in providing a more sophisticated our defence and thus gave advance notice to the UNP government that
“socialist” window-dressing for what was a bourgeois program of you will not even lift a finger in the event of the physical destruction of
“national liberation.” our party. Throughout that period, the RCL defended itself and won the
22-7. In 1979 the WRP published Balasingham’s “On the Tamil respect of many sections of the working class and the youth, only because
national question” in its Labour Review and insisted that the RCL do the we never retreated from the theoretical and political foundations of the
same. In the hands of Balasingham, Lenin’s writings on the national ICFI, the world Trotskyist movement. It is precisely this fact which made
question in 1913 were turned inside out. Whilst Lenin had insisted that for our party a constant target of political provocation by Healy, Banda and
Marxists the most important consideration in the national question was Slaughter.”[53]
“the self-determination of the working class,” Balasingham argued that 22-11. While uncritically supporting the LTTE, the WRP had no
Lenin required Marxists to be uncritical supporters of the separatist compunction about maintaining political relations with a group who had
aspirations of the Tamil bourgeoisie. The task of the proletarian split from the RCL and was attacking it in Sinhala chauvinist terms. The
revolutionary, he declared, was “to support the [Tamil] struggle though it WRP pressed the RCL for a reconciliation with these renegades, which
is headed by the bourgeoisie and adopt a strategy to advance the struggle failed, and continued to use their malicious gossip to undermine the RCL.
towards national liberation and socialist revolution.” Balasingham’s On the basis of the group’s “reports”, Healy and Banda moved for the
reference to the “socialist revolution”, devoid of any struggle to unify and expulsion of the RCL from the ICFI at its Tenth Congress in 1985. While
mobilise workers independently of the bourgeoisie, was purely the expulsion was never carried out, the WRP leaders were clearly out to
decorative. In a 1980 polemic entitled “Towards a Socialist Tamil destroy the RCL and the IC.
Eelam”, the LTTE explicitly rejected any turn to the working class, To be continued
declaring: “Tamil people have had enough of the rotten ideology of unity Footnotes:
of the working class and an all-Sri Lankan revolution. A national minority 51. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 1, March 1987, p.54.
that is under the oppressive clutches of the majority must first fight for its 52. Ibid., pp. 54–5.
liberation.” 53. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 2, June 1987, p. 111.
22-8. The RCL continued to fight intransigently to unite Sinhala and
Tamil workers around their common class interests. The party carried out
extensive campaigns to defend the democratic rights of Tamils and to To contact the WSWS and the
expose the UNP’s involvement in the 1983 pogroms. But the WRP’s Socialist Equality Party visit:
uncritical support for the LTTE prevented any examination by the RCL of
the politics of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups and thus helped to
strengthen their influence among Tamil youth. It was only in the
aftermath of the 1985-87 split with the WRP that the RCL and the ICFI
could re-examine the national question, especially in relation to the
experiences of the working class in Sri Lanka.
22-9. The 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms produced a wave of revulsion in
India, especially in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi offered to broker peace talks. At the same time,
the Indian government covertly authorised military training to the various
armed Tamil organisations both to exert control over their activities and to
use them as a bargaining chip in its dealings with the Sri Lankan
government. All of the Tamil groups promoted illusions in the Indian
bourgeoisie as the defenders of Tamils and encouraged greater direct
Indian intervention, as had been done in Bangladesh. The Indian Stalinist
parties—the CPI and CPM—were directly involved in the Indian
government’s machinations, providing “political training” to the Tamil
youth under the supervision of Indian intelligence. The exception was the
LTTE. It maintained somewhat more distance from the Indian
government, but only so as to move more directly into the camp of the
regional Tamil bourgeoisie in India and the Sri Lankan Tamil bourgeoisie.
The LTTE maintained close ties with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. G.
Ramachandran and his bourgeois All India Anna Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (AIADMK), which used the LTTE connection to bolster its
own political image. Concerned not to disturb its relations with the LTTE,
the WRP opposed the RCL’s efforts to develop the fight for Trotskyism
in Tamil Nadu and India.


Lanka)—Part 10
5 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and represented at the meeting and was not informed about the discussion.
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 23-3. Following the defeat of the protracted British miners’ strike in
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in 1985, a crisis exploded inside the WRP that rapidly led to its break from
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. the ICFI and political disintegration. Keerthi Balasuriya travelled to
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Britain and learned for the first time of David North’s criticisms of the
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 WRP in October 1985. Along with representatives of the Australian SLL
and German BSA, he expressed his agreement with North’s analysis. On
23. The 1985–1986 split with the WRP October 25, 1985, the ICFI issued two statements: on the expulsion of
23-1. The Tenth Congress of the ICFI in January 1985 was dominated Gerry Healy and on the crisis in the British section. The latter statement
by two interrelated phenomena: first, a devastating political crisis inside identified the source of the political crisis in the “prolonged drift of the
the WRP and second, the suppression of fundamental political differences WRP leadership away from the strategic task of building the world party
that had been raised by the Workers League of the United States over the of socialist revolution towards an increasingly nationalist perspective and
preceding three years. Neither was discussed. As the WRP was practice.” The ICFI resolved that the WRP register its members on the
abandoning its previous principled struggle against Pabloism, the Workers explicit recognition of the political authority of ICFI and the
League had been moving in the opposite direction. In 1974, following the subordination of the British section to its decisions.
desertion of national secretary Tim Wohlforth, the Workers League made 23-4. On December 16, 1985, the ICFI received the report of its control
a deliberate turn to the working class and placed the fight against Pabloite commission on the WRP’s financial dealings. In response to the findings,
opportunism at the centre of the party’s work. The Workers League it passed a resolution declaring that the WRP had carried out a historic
played the leading role in the “Security and the Fourth International” betrayal of the ICFI and the international working class, which “consisted
investigation, which was bitterly opposed by all Pabloite groups. This of the complete abandonment of the theory of permanent revolution,
investigation exposed the network of Stalinist agents inside the Trotskyist resulting in the pursuit of unprincipled relations with sections of the
movement who had been responsible for Trotsky’s murder. It provided colonial bourgeoisie in return for money.” The ICFI resolved to suspend
conclusive evidence that SWP leader Joseph Hansen had been a Stalinist, the WRP pending an emergency ICFI Congress following the 8th
then FBI, agent. Congress of the WRP. A further resolution adopted the following day
23-2. In 1982, Workers League National Secretary David North reaffirmed the essential programmatic foundations of the ICFI and the
presented detailed criticisms of Gerry Healy’s Studies in Dialectical historic correctness of the struggle against Pabloism. The suspension of
Materialism, demonstrating that it represented an abandonment of the the WRP was decisive in reasserting the political authority of the ICFI
dialectical and historical materialism of Marx. North pointed out that “in and the central importance of the programmatic principles of the
the name of the struggle for dialectical materialism and against Trotskyist movement. The decision made clear that there would be no
propagandism”, there had been a steady drift away from the struggle for compromise on these fundamental issues and established a principled
Trotskyism, particularly the Theory of Permanent Revolution. The WRP basis for the resolution of the crisis within the WRP. Of the WRP
leadership responded by threatening to sever relations with the Workers delegates, only David Hyland, who led a minority inside the WRP that
League unless North withdrew his criticisms. In a letter to WRP General was to later form the British section of the ICFI, voted for the resolutions.
Secretary Mike Banda in January 1984, North made a further analysis of The opposition of the Banda-Slaughter faction demonstrated that, while
the WRP’s positions, particularly in relation to the Middle East, and they had fallen out with Healy, they shared the same underlying
stated that the Workers League was “deeply troubled by the growing opportunist and national perspective.
signs of a political drift towards positions quite similar—both in 23-5. In a letter to David North, Slaughter opposed the subordination of
conclusions and methodology—to those which we have historically the WRP to the ICFI asserting that internationalism consisted of “laying
associated with Pabloism.” In February 1984, North delivered a political down class lines and fighting them through.” In its reply, the Workers
report to the ICFI that began by analysing the significance of the League Political Committee asked: “But by what process are these ‘class
American SWP’s unambiguous renunciation of the Theory of Permanent lines’ determined? Does it require the existence of the Fourth
Revolution in December 1982. He highlighted the WRP’s adaptation not International?... The International Committee of the Fourth International
only to bourgeois regimes in the Middle East but to Labour lefts and the is the historical embodiment of the ‘whole programmatic base of
trade union bureaucracy in Britain. Again the WRP threatened to split Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin.’ The subordination of
with the Workers League and blocked any discussion. The RCL was not national sections to the IC is the organised expression of their agreement

with the defence of that program. Those parties which uphold Trotskyism Workers Revolution Party Betrayed Trotskyismthat 1973–1985
as the contemporary development of Marxist principles and program are been challenged, let alone refuted, by any of the WRP renegades. David
organised in the Fourth International and accept the authority of the North replied to Banda’s anti-Trotskyist diatribe in his book The Heritage
International Committee. To base one’s definition of internationalism on We Defend that clarified crucial aspects of the Fourth International’s
the separation of the program from its organisational expression is to history and program. These works plus innumerable other articles and
adopt the standpoint of all those revisionist and centrist opponents of statements became the basis for the education of the cadre of the
Trotskyism who deny the continuity of Marxism, embodied in the ICFI, in movement and for overcoming the impact of the WRP’s political
order to retain freedom of action within their theatre of operations.”[54] degeneration on the sections of the IC.
23-6. The WRP split from the ICFI at its rump congress on February 8, 24-3. The split transformed the work of the RCL. The documents of the
1986 on the basis of Banda’s document “27 Reasons Why the ICFI and the pivotal issues that they raised were thoroughly discussed in
International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth the leadership and membership of the party, which overwhelmingly
International be Built” which renounced the entire struggle of the IC supported the IC. Over the next two years, Keerthi Balasuriya
against Pabloism. All supporters of the IC were excluded from the concentrated on the programmatic work of the ICFI, especially in relation
congress. Within months, Banda had repudiated Trotskyism, proclaimed to the Theory of Permanent Revolution. Balasuriya and David North
capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union to be impossible and hailed wrote the editorial of the Fourth International in March 1987 (Volume
Stalin as the necessary Bonapartist leader who had defended the gains of 14, No. 1) that provided a detailed exposure of Banda’s renunciation of
the October Revolution. The ICFI concluded one year later in an Permanent Revolution going back to his adulation of Mao and Ho Chi
exhaustive study of all those who split with the IC in 1985–86: “The main Minh in the late 1960s. The same issue published the correspondence
orientation of all the anti-ICFI tendencies is towards an out and out between Balasuriya and the SLL leaders on the Bangladesh liberation
capitulation to Stalinism and Social Democracy, the repudiation of the struggle. The RCL, in conjunction with the ICFI, also resumed and
political independence of the working class, and ever more pronounced expanded its political work in India.
orientation toward participation in popular front alliances with sections of 24-4. The split created the conditions for an important discussion of the
the bourgeoisie.”[55] national question that confronted the RCL directly in the form of the
23-7. The split in the International Committee was a reflection of escalating civil war against the LTTE. In 1986, Balasuriya wrote a
profound changes in the economic base and political superstructure of lengthy article entitled “The Tamil Struggle and the Treachery of Healy,
world capitalism. The global integration of productive processes and the Banda and Slaughter” that exposed the WRP’s opportunist veering from
exploitation of cheap labour platforms in Asia that had begun in the late complete indifference to the Tamil struggle and backing for the Sri
1970s had undermined the programs of national economic regulation on Lankan nation-state in the early 1970s to its uncritical support for the
which the social democratic, Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist LTTE from 1979 onwards. “As this examination of the historical record
leaderships had rested in the post-war period. Pabloism emerged within of Healy, Banda and Slaughter on the Tamil national struggle makes
the Fourth International as an opportunist adaptation to the dominance of clear, this pack of scoundrels masquerading as Trotskyists have
these bureaucratic apparatuses over the working class. The British SLL systematically betrayed the Tamil and Sinhalese workers alike. Above all,
defended the program of Trotskyism but faced growing isolation, they consciously worked, even though unsuccessfully, to destroy the only
particularly after the SWP’s reunification in 1963 with the Pabloites and party in Sri Lanka which fought for the perspective of the theory of
the split with the OCI in 1971. The SLL’s increasingly nationalist permanent revolution—the RCL,” he concluded.
orientation began to diverge from that of the new IC sections formed in 24-5. The aftermath of the split coincided with an acute political crisis
the 1960s and early 1970s that based themselves on the lessons of the for the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie. The UNP government confronted serious
splits of 1953 and 1961–63. This process accelerated with the foundation military setbacks in the North and growing social unrest in the South
of the WRP. As it abandoned the struggle against Pabloism on which its fuelled by an economic downturn and the impact of its pro-market
political authority within the IC rested, the WRP blocked political policies. President J.R. Jayewardene sought to buy time by agreeing to
discussion inside the international movement and responded to criticism India’s appeals for negotiations with the various armed Tamil groups. In
with organisational threats and political provocations. The victory of the the wake of failed talks in the Bhutanese capital of Thimpu in 1985,
Trotskyists within the IC and the restoration of Trotskyism to the centre Jayewardene initiated All-Party Round Table talks in Colombo in 1986 to
of its work marked a profound shift in class relations that was to become enlist the assistance of the opposition political parties for “a common
more evident with the decay and disintegration of the old bureaucratic program for peace.” The petty-bourgeois radicals of the NSSP joined the
organisations of the working class and the rapid move to the right of all LSSP, CP and the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party (SLMP)—a leftist grouping
the Pabloite groupings. of former SLFP parliamentarians headed by Bandaranaike’s daughter
Chandrika Kumaratunga—in talks with the UNP government. All of them
24. After the split with the WRP bear political responsibility for the outcome—the signing of the
24-1. As the ICFI explained: “The 1985–86 split is, without any Indo-Lanka Accord in July 1987 by Jayewardene and Indian Prime
question, a historical milestone in the development of the Fourth Minister Rajiv Gandhi to send Indian troops to the northern and eastern
International. It is the culmination of the protracted struggle that has been provinces. In the guise of implementing a peace deal, the real purpose of
waged by the Trotskyist movement against Pabloite opportunism since the the military mission was to disarm the Tamil guerrillas and suppress any
founding of the International Committee in 1953. The long period of political opposition to the terms of the agreement. The SLFP refused to
disunity and confusion created by Pabloite opportunism is coming to a take part in the government’s Round Table talks and, along with the JVP,
close. The conditions have been created for the consolidation of all launched a chauvinist campaign against any peace deal.
genuine Trotskyists, that is, revolutionary Marxists, from all over the 24-6. The RCL was the only party to oppose the Round Table talks and
world under the banner of the International Committee.”[56] the Indo-Lanka Accord from the standpoint of proletarian
24-2. The split with the WRP led to an unprecedented development of internationalism—calling for the unity of the working class in Sri Lanka
international collaboration between sections of the ICFI and a renaissance and India against the military intervention. The party warned that the
of Marxism within the international movement. The IC produced a dispatch of troops stemmed from the crises facing the Jayewardene and
lengthy analysis of the degeneration of the WRP entitled How the Gandhi governments, was directed against the working class and rural

masses, and was a trap for the Tamil people. It was no accident that amid partner in imperialist plunder. The type of state created in this process has
the Round Table talks in June 1986, the police arrested three RCL been nothing more than a prison ground for putrefying capitalism, upon
members—Wije Dias, Brutan Perera and Ruman Perera—for campaigning which the progressive development of the productive forces has been
for a meeting to defend public education and held them for six weeks. impossible ... Arising out of such conditions, with the joyous approval of
Shortly after his release, Brutan Perera was detained again, along with the bourgeoisie, are the horrors of intercommunal warfare. This state of
RCL youth leader Viran Peiris. They were released only after an extensive affairs cannot be altered as long as bourgeois rule prevails. The
international campaign involving all sections of the ICFI. This attempt to post-independence history of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,
intimidate and silence the RCL was clearly provoked by the UNP’s Burma—in fact, of every former colonial country in the world—decisively
sensitivity to any criticism of its “peace” machinations. proves that the bourgeoisie cannot establish genuine national unification
24-7. The Indo-Lankan Accord was a devastating exposure of all the and political independence.”[57]
armed Tamil groups, including the LTTE, that placed their faith in the 25-3. Consequently, these bourgeois democratic tasks fall to the
Indian government and army to guarantee the democratic rights of Tamils. proletariat. While upholding the right to self-determination, the ICFI
All along their perspective had been to gain the support of the Indian statement insisted that national self-determination could only be achieved
bourgeoisie for the creation of a separate capitalist Eelam. The through the strategy of socialist revolution and was therefore subordinate
governments of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, however, had not the slightest to it. “It [the working class] is the only social force that can realise the
concern about Tamil democratic rights; they cynically sought to use the right of nations to self-determination. However, it does this not as an
Tamil struggle to further New Delhi’s ambitions to become the appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy.
predominant regional power. In 1987, India intervened militarily to It fights for self-determination with its own weapons and on the basis of
suppress a Tamil insurgency it had encouraged in order to pressure its own program, rallying behind it all the oppressed masses of the
Colombo but that threatened to provoke unrest in India and undermine the villages and countryside. Self-determination is achieved as a by-product
reactionary post-war state system in South Asia. Those outfits most of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat which, having established
closely tied to New Delhi, including the EPRLF, TELO and PLOTE, its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed people their legitimate
functioned as auxiliaries to India’s army of occupation with EPRLF democratic rights. As the framework for the genuine equality of nations, it
leader Vardadaraja Perumal becoming provincial chief minister for the proposes the creation of a voluntarily united socialist federation. While
merged North and East. As it sought to establish its unchallenged control, believing that the voluntary amalgamation of all oppressed nations offers
the Indian army resorted to widespread arrests, rape, torture and the best opportunity for economic and cultural progress, the proletarian
extra-judicial murders that alienated Tamils and brought it into conflict dictatorship pledges that those nations which wish to secede shall have the
with the LTTE. However, even as its fighters were being hunted down, right to do so. This is the essential content of the program advanced by the
the LTTE continued to proclaim its faith in India and Rajiv Gandhi. Revolutionary Communist League for a United Socialist States of Tamil
24-8. The Indo-Lanka Accord produced a political crisis in the ranks of Eelam and Sri Lanka.”[58]
Tamil organisations in Sri Lanka and the broader international diaspora. 25-4. The ICFI statement also began the process of reassessing the
Keerthi Balasuriya addressed several well-attended meetings in Europe of character of the various national liberation movements in the light of the
young Tamil militants who were looking for answers to the perfidy of LTTE’s political capitulation to the Indian bourgeoisie. In contrast to the
their organisations. The most farsighted elements drew the conclusion that broad anti-colonial movements before and after World War II that drew in
it was only on the basis of the ICFI’s perspective and an orientation to the the masses across ethnicity, language, religion and caste, organisations
working class that the oppression of Tamils could be ended. They joined such as the LTTE were based on national exclusivity. This, as Lenin had
the ICFI and have made a powerful contribution to its work in Europe and warned, was the outlook of the national bourgeoisie which conceived
South Asia. self-determination solely in terms of establishing its own national
privileges and the conditions for the exploitation of workers and peasants
25. The United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam within its own “independent” state. In the case of the LTTE, its program
25-1. In November 1987, the ICFI published a comprehensive statement for an independent Eelam was drawn directly from the bourgeois TULF
entitled “The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the that represented the meagre aims of the Tamil bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka,
Revolutionary Communist League” that for the first time raised the which had no perspective either for the hundreds of thousands of Tamil
slogan of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam. The plantation workers in the centre of the island or for the Tamil masses
statement, based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution, unambiguously across the Palk Strait in southern India.
insisted that the democratic rights of Tamils would only be realised 25-5. An RCL statement cited in the document explained: “[N]ational
through the struggle of the working class for socialism. In other words, liberation cannot be achieved through a movement based on national
national self-determination, like other democratic tasks, could not be exclusivism and aimed to win one’s own rights only. In our epoch, such a
resolved by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements no matter how movement will find itself isolated among capitalist nations, whatever the
courageous or militant. The slogan clearly demarcated the RCL’s strength of the mass movement it may generate. A liberation movement of
orientation in fighting to mobilise the working class—Sinhala and a particular oppressed nation can go forward only as part and parcel of a
Tamil—to defend basic democratic rights through the struggle for movement fighting fully and unreservedly for democracy. National
socialism from any tendency to reduce the party to the role of cheerleader exclusivism prevents the national liberation struggle of an oppressed
and political adviser to the Tamil national movement—as the WRP had nation from becoming part of such a movement. This is because, in the
done. last analysis, national exclusivism is connected to the attempt made by the
25-2. As the ICFI statement explained, none of the so-called national bourgeoisie to exploit the workers and peasants in its own
independent states established after World War II had met the democratic country. Herein lies the source from which flows the political impotence
aspirations or basic material needs of the masses. “Invariably, of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.”[59] The ICFI statement laid the
imperialist-sanctioned ‘independence’ has meant the setting up of bastard basis for a wider consideration of the support of the Marxist movement
states whose very foundations have been built upon a fatal compromise of for the right of nations to self-determination.
democratic principles. In this process, the national bourgeoisie has 25-6. Shortly after the statement’s publication, Keerthi Balasuriya died
functioned not as the liberator of the oppressed masses, but as a junior suddenly and tragically on 18 December 1987 from a coronary

thrombosis. He was just 39 years old and had devoted his entire adult life
to the struggle for Trotskyism. At the age of 19, amid the political
confusion generated by the LSSP’s betrayal, Balasuriya undertook the
huge responsibility of leading the RCL and, in so doing, reknitting the ties
of the Sri Lankan working class to the international Trotskyist movement.
He and the RCL stood against the tide of middle-class radicalism and the
cult of the “armed struggle” that animated movements such as the LTTE
and JVP in the late 1960s and 1970s. He defended the Theory of
Permanent Revolution when it came under universal attack not only from
the Stalinist parties and their various Pabloite apologists, but also from the
WRP within the ICFI. In doing so, Balasuriya made an indelible
contribution to the struggle for Trotskyism in Asia and internationally.
25-7. In his funeral oration, David North explained: “Comrade Keerthi
was profoundly convinced of the scientific validity of the perspective for
which Trotsky had fought. While the petty-bourgeois radicals were
impressed by the ‘successes’ of Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel
Castro, Comrade Keerthi insisted that the political orientation of Marxists
had to be to the proletariat as the sole consistently revolutionary force on
the planet ... In the period immediately ahead, the workers, not only in
Asia but throughout the world, will read and study the writings of
Comrade Keerthi. And we are confident that it will not be the Mao
Tse-tungs, Ho Chi Minhs and Castros that will be the teachers of the
youth. Rather, it will be from Keerthi Balasuriya, the Revolutionary
Communist League and the International Committee that the advanced
elements among the workers and the youth will learn their revolutionary
lessons.”[60]
25-8. Balasuriya’s untimely death was a major political blow to the
RCL, to the ICFI and to the international working class. It came at a
critical time when the process of clarifying and consolidating the RCL in
the immediate aftermath of the split with the WRP renegades was still
underway. It is testimony to Balasuriya and the principles for which he
fought that the cadre he had been instrumental in training was capable of
withstanding the loss, reconsolidating under the leadership of Wije Dias,
and waging a consistent struggle for socialist internationalism under the
difficult conditions of an escalating civil war.
To be continued
Footnotes:
54. Fourth International, Volume 13, No. 2, p. 77.
55. Fourth International, Volume, 14 No. 1, p. 4.
56. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth
International, (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p. 45.
57. Fourth International, Volume 15, No. 1, January–March 1988, pp.
20–21.
58. Ibid., p. 21.
59. Ibid., p. 20.
60. Ibid., pp. 9–10.



Lanka)—Part 11
By Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
6 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and of the Palestinian intifada to the reactionary interests of the Arab
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) bourgeoisie, and in the deal struck by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in right-wing Contra rebels.
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. 26-3. The ICFI insisted that the global integration of production, far
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 from opening up a new golden age of capitalism, had raised the
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 fundamental contradictions between world economy and the outmoded
nation-state system, and between social production and private ownership,
26. The International Perspectives of the ICFI to a new peak of intensity. The resolution identified the driving forces for
26-1. The ICFI’s Perspective Resolution of August 1988, The World a new period of revolutionary upsurge, including the economic decline of
Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, provided the the United States and the rise of inter-imperialist antagonisms, the
first comprehensive analysis of world economy and world politics since emergence of huge new battalions of the working class, particularly in
the WRP abandoned such work in the early 1970s. The resolution laid the Asia, the impoverishment of the backward countries and the crisis of
basis for the closer integration of all of the sections of the ICFI. Central to Stalinism.
the document was its examination of the implications of the 26-4. Turning to its strategic tasks, the ICFI summed up the lessons of
unprecedented global integration of production processes, which marked a the struggle following the 1985–86 split to overcome residual nationalist
qualitative shift in world economic relations that objectively strengthened tendencies that were the legacy of the WRP’s degeneration.
the international unity of the working class and the basis for a world “Revolutionary internationalism is the political antipode of opportunism.
socialist economy. The ICFI concluded: “It has long been an elementary In one form or another, opportunism expresses a definite adaptation to the
proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only in form, but so-called realities of political life within a given national environment.
that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new Opportunism, forever in search of shortcuts, elevates one or another
features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle national tactic above the fundamental program of the world socialist
must assume an international character. Even the most elemental struggles revolution. Considering the program of world socialist revolution too
of the working class pose the necessity of coordinating its actions on an abstract, the opportunist hankers after supposedly concrete tactical
international scale ... The unprecedented international mobility of capital initiatives. Not only does the opportunist choose to ‘forget’ the
has rendered all nationalist programs for the labour movement of different international character of the working class. He also ‘overlooks’ the fact
countries obsolete and reactionary. Such programs are invariably based on that the crisis in each country, having its essential origin in global
the voluntary collaborations of the labour bureaucracies with ‘their’ contradictions, can only be resolved on the basis of an international
ruling classes in the systematic lowering of workers’ living standards to program. No national tactic, however significant its role in the political
strengthen the position of ‘their’ capitalist country in the world arsenal of the party … can preserve its revolutionary content if it is
market.”[61] elevated above or, what amounts to the same thing, detached from, the
26-2. The bankruptcy of nationally-based programs was reflected in the world strategy of the International Committee. Thus, the central historic
wave of “renunciationism” sweeping the old leaderships of the working contribution which the sections of the International Committee make to
class. The Stalinist and social-democratic parties and the trade unions the workers’ movement in the countries in which they operate is the
were repudiating “even the elementary conceptions that the proletariat collective and unified struggle for the perspective of world socialist
exists as a distinct class in society and that it must defend its independent revolution.”[62]
interests against capitalist exploitation.” The ICFI analysed in detail the
advanced degeneration of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union, 27. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Eastern Europe and China. In opposition to all of the middle-class 27-1. The International Perspectives prepared the IC for the political
opportunist tendencies, the ICFI insisted that Gorbachev’s glasnost and crisis of Stalinism that erupted in 1989 with mass protests in China,
perestroika were the policies of capitalist restoration—as was rapidly followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in
verified. The document established that the crisis of the armed Tamil Eastern Europe, that culminated in December 1991 in the formal
groups in Sri Lanka was part of broader international processes stemming liquidation of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Soviet Union was a
from the inability of the national bourgeoisie to wage a consistent struggle political blow against the international working class that produced
against imperialism. The LTTE’s capitulation to New Delhi found considerable disorientation and confusion. Against the triumphalism of
diverse parallels in the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s subordination the bourgeoisie, the International Committee was alone in insisting that

the end of the Soviet Union did not signify the victory of the capitalist the Chinese Revolution.”[64] Following the crackdown, foreign
market and the end of socialism. Trotsky in his seminal work The investment flooded into China as transnational corporations concluded
Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, had predicted the eventual that the Tiananmen Square massacre was a guarantee that the CCP police
liquidation of the remaining social gains of the Russian Revolution and state regime would not hesitate to use all methods to suppress the working
the restoration of capitalist property relations unless the Soviet working class and guarantee private profit. The restoration of capitalism in China
class carried out a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy. under the CCP has been accompanied by the emergence of a bourgeoisie
The end of the USSR did not represent the failure of socialism but of in close association with the state bureaucracy, a deepening social divide,
Stalinism and its reactionary nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One and a return of many of the social evils of pre-1949 China.
Country” under the impact of globalised production. Having long ago 27-4. The liquidation of the Soviet Union had political and economic
abandoned the struggle for the world socialist revolution, the Stalinist ramifications throughout Asia, not least in India, which depended heavily
bureaucracy responded to the crisis of the Soviet economy, and growing on Soviet markets, economic aid and geopolitical support. In 1991, facing
working-class unrest, by integrating it within global capitalism and a balance of payments crisis, the Congress government began the process
anchoring, thereby, its own privileges in capitalist private property. The of dismantling the edifice of Indian national economic regulation and
collapse of the USSR was a product of the unravelling of the post-war opening up to foreign investment. The Indian Stalinist parties not only
order and the intensification of the fundamental contradiction of supported the new orientation but, in the states of West Bengal and Kerala
capitalism between world economy and the bankrupt nation-state system. where it held power, the CPM led the charge for pro-market restructuring.
Far from opening up a bright new future for capitalism, the end of the The collapse of the Cold War framework ended the ability of the
Soviet Union and its autarkic national economy foreshadowed the bourgeoisie in backward capitalist countries to politically balance
transformation or collapse of all parties and institutions based on national between the Soviet and Western blocs and to posture, with the aid of
economic regulation. The ICFI explained that the intensification of the Moscow and Beijing, as “anti-imperialists.” Again the process was
basic contradictions of capitalism would inevitably lead to a new period especially pronounced in India, a leading member of the so-called
of profound economic crisis, wars and revolution. non-aligned movement with strong ties to the Soviet Union. New Delhi
27-2. The inability of the Soviet and Eastern European working class to began to mend its bridges with Washington and drop its previous support
develop its own class response to capitalist restorationism brought into for national movements such as the PLO.
sharp relief the enormous damage done to the political consciousness of 27-5. The naked embrace of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc and
the international working class by the long domination of the various China compounded the political crisis of the region’s Stalinist parties,
Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist bureaucracies and, which either collapsed completely like the Communist Party of Thailand,
above all, by the murder of the finest representatives of revolutionary fractured as in the case of the Communist Party of the Philippines, or
Marxism by Stalin and his gangsters in the 1930s. In opposition to any completed their integration into the political establishment as in Japan and
conception that socialist revolution would emerge spontaneously, David India. The various armed national liberation movements, as epitomised by
North in his report to the 12th Plenum of the ICFI explained: “The the LTTE’s advocacy of a “Tiger economy” for Sri Lanka, rapidly shed
intensification of the class struggle provides the general foundation of the their former “socialist” posturing, embraced the ideology of the market
revolutionary movement. But it does not by itself directly and and sought their own accommodation with imperialism.
automatically create the political, intellectual, and, one might add, cultural
environment that its development requires, and which prepares the 28. The RCL and the United Front
historical setting for a truly revolutionary situation.”[63] The report 28-1. An acute economic and political crisis dominated Sri Lanka
concluded that the responsibility fell to the International Committee to throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. As fighting broke out in the
re-establish within the working class the great political culture of North between the LTTE and the Indian army, mounting unrest among
Marxism. An essential component of the ICFI’s subsequent work has the working class and rural poor was derailed by a combination of state
been the systematic exposure of the various elements of what it termed repression and the JVP’s chauvinist campaign against the Indo-Lankan
“The Post-Soviet School of Falsification” that has sought to bury the Accord. JVP gunmen targeted politicians and parties that supported the
significance of the Russian Revolution and particularly the work of Leon Accord. The government imposed martial law in November 1988,
Trotsky under a mountain of lies. mandating the death penalty for organising or participating in strikes or
27-3. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, the collapse of protests. The UNP’s Ranasinghe Premadasa—who had opposed the
the Stalinist regimes led to a rapid opening up to foreign investment, the Accord—won the presidential election in December 1988 and immediately
wholesale looting of state-owned enterprises by the emerging kleptocracy sought a deal with the JVP in order to stabilise bourgeois rule.
and a staggering retrogression in the living standards of working people. 28-2. A de facto alliance between the UNP government and the JVP
In China, the process of capitalist restoration was more protracted. Just 23 confronted the working class with state repression as well as the JVP’s
years after the revolution, the Maoist regime reached an accommodation fascistic attacks on anyone who opposed its orders to join its “strikes” to
with US imperialism in 1972 that led to a de facto alliance against the “defend the motherland.” The RCL was the only party to fight for the
Soviet Union and re-established China’s economic relations with the independent mobilisation of workers against both the Indo-Lankan
West. The opening of China to foreign investment and the restoration of Accord and the JVP’s chauvinist campaign. On this basis, the RCL won
capitalist market relations began after Deng Xiaoping came to power in the leadership of the Central Bank Employees Union (CBEU) in June
1978, producing growing resistance in the working class. In the wake of 1988. As a result of its stand, the RCL confronted police raids and arrests
the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989, an as well as JVP attacks. JVP thugs murdered RCL members R.A. Pitawela
ICFI statement entitled “Victory to the Political Revolution in China” on November 12, 1988, P.H. Gunapala on December 23, 1988 and
explained: “The mass killings of the past week are the political Gretian Geekiyanage on June 23, 1989.
culmination of a decade during which the Beijing Stalinists have worked 28-3. In collaboration with its sister parties in the ICFI, the RCL
systematically to restore capitalism to China and reintegrate its economy initiated a campaign in November 1988 for a united front of all parties of
into the structure of world imperialism. The main purpose of the terror the working class to take immediate concrete measures to defend workers
unleashed by the Beijing regime is to intimidate the Chinese masses and and their organisations from state repression and JVP attacks. In a letter to
crush all opposition to its deliberate liquidation of the social conquests of working-class parties, the RCL called for a break from the parties of the

Sri Lankan bourgeoisie—the UNP, SLFP and SLMP—and the mobilisation workers and the rural peasantry. On this basis, the RCL carried out an
of “the class strength of the working class to defend basic democratic extensive campaign to expose the atrocities being carried out by state
rights.” The RCL called for workers’ defence squads and action forces and to mobilise workers and students to defend the rural youth.
committees, joint picket lines and a general strike, and despite extremely
difficult circumstances, campaigned vigorously for its demands in the 30. The National Question
working class. The ICFI’s international campaign for the United Front 30-1. The ICFI returned to a critical re-examination of the national
included an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand by two RCL question following the eruption of separatist movements in the Balkans,
members in conjunction with the Australian SLL. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In his writings of 1913–16,
28-4. The call for a United Front in no way implied a political amnesty Lenin had advocated the “right to self-determination” as a means of
for the opportunist parties, which unanimously opposed it. Speaking for uniting the working class and rallying the support of the oppressed
all of them, the NSSP denounced the United Front as “sectarian” and nationalities for the struggle against Czarism and imperialism. As Trotsky
“ultra-left” for refusing to include the SLMP, which the NSSP falsely explained: “In this the Bolshevik Party did not by any means undertake an
described as the “new proletarian reformist mass tendency”. The NSSP’s evangel of separation. It merely assumed an obligation to struggle
own “United Socialist Alliance” with the SLMP, the LSSP and CP was implacably against every form of national oppression, including the
classic popular frontism, aimed at soliciting protection from the UNP forcible retention of this or that nationality within the boundaries of the
government and state apparatus. In its reply, the RCL warned: “In the first general state. Only in this way could the Russian proletariat gradually win
place, it [the rejection of a united front] is an act which is absolutely the confidence of the oppressed nationalities.”[65] Yet in the decades
hostile to the active organisation of practical measures by the working after World War II, the Pabloites and numerous other petty-bourgeois
class against its class enemy. Second, it ties the working class to fronts pseudo-Marxists systematically distorted the “right to self-determination”
formed on bourgeois programs, weakens and politically disarms it, and to mean that the working class was politically obligated to support
creates the opportunity for the class enemy to drown the working class virtually any demand for national-ethnic separatism.
and the poor peasants in a blood bath.” The “left” parties dropped any 30-2. Lenin’s stance had always been conditional on socio-economic
criticism of the government’s repressive measures and received arms in circumstances and the development of the class struggle. On the eve of
return, while hundreds of militant workers and trade unionists paid for World War I, when Lenin had advocated the right to self-determination in
this treachery with their lives. Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Czarist Empire, these regions were
still predominantly agrarian and capitalism and the national movement
29. The RCL and the peasantry were largely in their infancy. Nearly a century on, conditions in these
29-1. Confronting mounting social unrest in the South, President regions, as around the world, were vastly different. Small cliques of
Premadasa took a pronounced public stand against the Indo-Lankan ex-Stalinist bureaucrats and capitalists whipped up ethnic and communal
Accord, demanding that Indian troops leave Sri Lanka by July 1989. He sentiment in the countries of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia, as a
signed a ceasefire with, and covertly supplied arms to, the LTTE in June means to carve out their own territory as part of the process of capitalist
1989, thereby assisting its armed struggle against the Indian army. Having restoration. Far from being anti-imperialist, these movements actively
failed to reach a deal with the JVP, the UNP turned on it and then more sought the support of the imperialist powers which, as in the case of
broadly against its social base—the Sinhala peasantry. In November 1989, Balkans, encouraged separatism as a means of furthering their economic
the security forces detained and brutally murdered most of the JVP and strategic ambitions. In Lenin’s day, the national movements in the
leadership, including its top leader Rohana Wijeweera. These murders colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia and Africa had barely begun.
were the start of a virtual war waged by the security forces and associated Nearly a century later, it was the abject failure of the nationalist
death squads against the rural masses over the next two years in which an movements that gained “independence” after World War II to resolve
estimated 60,000 people were slaughtered. basic democratic tasks that spawned new separatist tendencies based on
29-2. The abrupt about-face by the Sri Lankan ruling class confronted ethnicity, religion and language.
the RCL with new political challenges that were discussed extensively 30-3. The globalisation of production was a key factor in the spread of
within the ICFI. The RCL had to warn the working class about the grave national-separatist movements at the end of the twentieth century. The
dangers of state repression and energetically call on workers to oppose the processes of globalisation vastly reduced the significance of national
violent attacks on rural youth. It was not simply a matter of the fate of the markets and nationally-based production in comparison to the global
JVP leaders, but the social base on which the organisation rested. Just as it market and globally-integrated production. As the International
had done in the wake of the April 1971 uprising, the RCL had to maintain Committee explained: “The new global economic relations have also
an intransigent opposition to the government in all aspects of the party’s provided an objective impulse for a new type of nationalist movement,
work, champion the defence of the rural masses and, in doing so, seeking the dismemberment of existing states. Globally-mobile capital has
concretely forge the alliance between the working class and the peasantry given smaller territories the ability to link themselves directly to the world
necessary for the socialist revolution. market. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have become the new models
29-3. The RCL issued a comprehensive statement opposing the state of development. A small coastal enclave, possessing adequate
massacre of rural youth in the South and the renewed war in the North transportation links, infrastructure and a supply of cheap labour may
against the Tamil masses in the aftermath of the Indian army withdrawal. prove a more attractive base for multinational capital than a larger country
It explained that the defence of the rural masses—Sinhala and Tamil with a less productive hinterland.”[66]
alike—was indissolubly bound up with the fight to abolish capitalism and 30-4. Summing up the character of the new separatist movements, the
establish a workers’ and peasants’ government in the form of a Socialist ICFI explained: “In India and China,” the national movements of the first
Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The RCL indicted the opportunist half of the twentieth century “posed the progressive task of unifying
leaderships of the working class—the LSSP, CP and NSSP—both for disparate peoples in a common struggle against imperialism—a task which
supporting the war in the North and blocking any independent political proved unrealisable under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. The
mobilisation of the working class to defend the rural masses in the South. new form of nationalism promotes separatism along ethnic, linguistic and
The statement outlined a detailed program of transitional demands to religious lines, with the aim of dividing up existing states for the benefit
address the democratic aspirations and pressing economic needs of of local exploiters. Such movements have nothing to do with a struggle

against imperialism, nor do they in any sense embody the democratic
aspirations of the masses of oppressed. They serve to divide the working To contact the WSWS and the
class and divert the class struggle into ethno-communal warfare.”[67] In Socialist Equality Party visit:
the interests of unifying the working class, the International Committee
insisted on a critical, even hostile, attitude to the proliferation of national
separatist movements and their invocation of “the right to
self-determination” to justify the formation of separate capitalist states.
30-5. This analysis has a particular relevance to South Asia where the
national bourgeoisie’s abortion of the democratic revolution and the
failure of its respective nationalist projects has produced a multitude of
divisive bourgeois tendencies based on religion, caste, language and
ethnicity. In India, the turn from the old schemes of national economic
regulation to the embrace of foreign investment and integration in global
production processes has accentuated regional economic disparities and
deepened social inequality. The resulting social crisis and popular anger is
being exploited by various bourgeois tendencies to promote ethnic
separatism, including to press for the creation of separate
ethnically-defined nation-states in Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Assam and
other parts of the north-east. The ICFI explained: “The central question
here is, how does the revolutionary party of the working class respond to
the breakup of the old bourgeois nationalist movements? Are the masses
in these countries to advance their interests through new separatist
movements based on fragments of the states created through
decolonisation and founded on religious particularism? We categorically
reject such a perspective. Such statelets will provide no way forward for
the working class and the oppressed masses of India or anywhere else. At
best they will create profits for a thin layer of the privileged classes if they
are able to create a free trade zone and cut their own deals with
transnational capital. For the masses, they hold out the prospect only of
ethnic bloodbaths and intensified exploitation.”[68]
30-6. As part of the ICFI discussion, the RCL concluded that support for
the right of “self-determination for the Tamil people”, which in practical
political terms could only mean support for the national separatist project
of the LTTE, no longer had any progressive content. As the war restarted
in 1990, the LTTE took on an even more pronounced anti-democratic and
communal character: outlawing political opposition and murdering
political rivals; denouncing all Muslims as “enemy agents” and driving
them out of Jaffna; killing captured soldiers and police; and
indiscriminately attacking Sinhalese civilians. While rejecting the
LTTE’s separatist program, the RCL continued to intransigently oppose
the Sri Lankan government’s efforts to forcibly maintain the island’s
unity by military means. Its demand for the unconditional withdrawal of
the armed forces from the North and East did not imply support for a
separate Eelam. Rather, in opposing the military oppression of Tamils, the
RCL was seeking to unite the working class and oppressed masses in a
revolutionary struggle for the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
To be continued
Footnotes:
61. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth
International, pp. 6–7.
62. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
63. David North, “The Struggle for Marxism and the Tasks of the
Fourth International,” Fourth International, Volume 19, Number 1, Fall
Winter 1992, p. 74.
64. Fourth International, Volume 16, Nos. 1–2, p. 1.
65. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3
(London: Sphere Books, 1967) pp. 41–42.
66. International Committee of the Fourth International, Globalisation
and the International Working Class, Mehring Books, 1998, p. 108.
67. Ibid., p. 109.
68. Ibid., p. 115.


Lanka)—Part 12
7 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and and its offshoot, the United Socialist Party (USP), have remained as
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) satellites of the Colombo establishment, entering into a series of
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in increasingly grotesque political marriages. In the mid-1990s, as hostility
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts. to the PA government grew, the NSSP struck a deal with the JVP, whose
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 gunmen had been killing its members just a decade previously. The JVP,
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 which had been legalised by Kumaratunga, used the NSSP as a stepping
stone to establishing a presence in the trade unions then broke off the
31. The Socialist Equality Party alliance. Throughout their various political twists and turns, the NSSP and
31-1. The transformation of the RCL into the Socialist Equality Party USP have maintained one constant: their visceral hostility to the SEP’s
(SEP) in 1996 flowed from the conclusions drawn by the ICFI about the fight for the political independence of the working class.
transformation of all the old organisations of the working class. In 31-4. The evolution of the trade unions in Sri Lanka paralleled that of
conditions of the post-war stabilisation and economic expansion of the union apparatuses in the advanced capitalist countries. Under the
capitalism, the various trade union, social democratic and Stalinist impact of globalised production, the union bureaucracies abandoned the
organisations had, within the framework of national economic regulation, defence of even the most basic rights of the working class and have been
been able to make limited immediate gains for the working class, while transformed into direct agents of management. In the wake of the unions’
betraying its long-term historical interests. The IC sections had taken the betrayals, particularly after the 1980 general strike, union membership
form of leagues in recognition that the social democratic and Stalinist plummeted. However, unlike their counterparts in the US and Europe, the
organisations still held the political allegiance of broad layers of unions in Sri Lanka, for the most part, lacked alternate sources of income
socialist-minded workers, intellectuals and youth. The RCL’s demand and rapidly decayed. As the unions were federated by party affiliation,
that the LSSP and CP break from the SLFP and take the road to the disgust with the old party leaderships compounded their precipitous
formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government based on socialist decline.
policies was aimed at exposing these parties and winning the most 31-5. The so-called plantation unions, in the first instance the Ceylon
advanced layers of the working class. However, the globalisation of Workers’ Congress (CWC), form a special case. The CWC always
production had destroyed any objective basis for national reformism and functioned more as a paternalistic benevolent society than a trade union. It
transformed the old organisations into direct agencies of the national retained a significant membership and resources due to its control, with
bourgeoisie in slashing jobs, conditions and living standards in the the support of management, over every aspect of life on the
never-ending race for “international competitiveness.” In no sense could plantations—from housing, health care and schooling to marriages,
these parties and trade unions any longer be considered organisations funerals and religious celebrations. Using its members as a captive vote
based on the working class or speaking in its name. bank, CWC leaders entered parliament and bartered for ministerial
31-2. The LSSP and CP entered a third SLFP-led coalition government positions and privileges. The various alternative unions such as the Up
in 1994 under prime minister, later president, Chandrika Kumaratunga. Country People’s Front (UPF) operated no differently. None of these
The two parties had never recovered from the profound hostility in the organisations, which together act to suppress one of the most oppressed
working class generated by their participation in the Bandaranaike sections of the working class, commands any significant positive support
government of the 1970s. By the time they joined the People’s Alliance among workers.
(PA), the LSSP and CP were hollow shells. No workers expected either 31-6. The establishment of the SEP was the pivotal first step in
party to fight for basic social reforms, let alone take up the revolutionary preparing for new movements of the working class. These movements
struggle for socialism. Any lingering illusions were quickly dispelled by will not take place through the old organisations, but in a revolt against
the LSSP and CP’s support for Kumaratunga’s escalating war and attacks them—a revolt that has to be politically prepared and organisationally led
on basic democratic rights and living standards. They have subsequently by the SEP. The Socialist Equality Party was adopted as the new name
functioned as virtual factions of the SLFP, rather than independent after extensive discussion in the International Committee to focus on the
parties. essential aim of socialism—to end social inequality—that had been obscured
31-3. The NSSP, whose leaders never opposed the first two coalition by decades of misuse of the term by Social Democracy, Stalinism and
governments, backed Kumaratunga’s election. One faction headed by Pabloism. In its 1996 perspectives document, the SEP concluded: “The
Vasudeva Nanayakkara drew the logical conclusion from the NSSP’s recognition of the changed relationship of the working class and the
program of class collaboration and joined the PA government. The NSSP oppressed masses to all the old parties and bureaucracies demand that the

sections of the International Committee assume the leadership of the that has had disastrous consequences for working people, both Sinhalese
impending revolutionary struggles of the masses.” and Tamil, throughout the island.”
33-2. At the June 2000 plenum of the WSWS and ICFI, the significance
32. The World Socialist Web Site of Kumaratunga’s letter and the political lessons for all sections of the
32-1. The establishment of the World Socialist Web Site in 1998 marked ICFI were exhaustively discussed. In his opening report, David North
a decisive turning point in the development for the ICFI and the explained: “We must recognise as a significant turning point in the history
international working class. The ICFI’s ability to take advantage of the of the International Committee that a section of our movement has
revolutionary developments in computer technology and to coordinate the received an invitation to participate in all-party talks with the national
political work of its sections on a daily basis to produce the WSWS was a government. It is not a matter of feeling honoured—we are certainly not.
product of the programmatic clarity and unity that had been achieved in Rather, it is a significant substantiation of a point we have been making
the aftermath of the 1985–86 split with the WRP. The World Socialist for some time: that beneath the surface of existing and long-established
Web Site not only allowed the ICFI to greatly extend its audience but political relationships—in which certain parties, organisations, individuals
provided the new scaffolding around which the international working and relations have dominated and seemed almost immovable, with
class could integrate its struggles and coalesce into a conscious political nothing appearing to change—a great deal is changing. Beneath the
force to abolish capitalism. surface, class relations are changing. The movement of socio-economic
32-2. The World Socialist Web Site was not simply a technical or tectonic plates, intensified by the breathtaking transformations in
organisational initiative but was rooted in fundamental political technology; alterations in patterns of world trade and economic
conceptions. At the 18th Plenum of the ICFI, David North elaborated these intercourse—i.e., profound changes in the mode of production and
foundations: “(1) The insistence of the ICFI on the primacy of production relations—are building immense charges into the whole
internationalism as the basis of the political strategy and tactical political superstructure and preparing the way for a sudden, dramatic and
organisation of the working class. (2) The uncompromising character of devastating political transformation.”
the struggle waged by the ICFI against the domination of the working 33-3. The plenum cautioned against any tendency towards complacency
class by reactionary labour bureaucracies. (3) The emphasis placed upon or political passivity. The ICFI had to be ready for sudden political shifts,
the revival of a genuine socialist political culture within the working class which could involve further attempts to draw out of its sections new bases
as an essential intellectual and, one might add, ‘spiritual’ premise of a of support for bourgeois rule as well as the use of state repression. What
new international revolutionary movement. This is the essential was emphasised was the necessity of sustained political and theoretical
intellectual substance and precondition of socialist revolution. (4) The work to prepare the party and ensure that it was not caught unprepared.
struggle against spontaneism and political fatalism in relation to the By constantly working over political questions, the party counteracts the
development of the crisis of capitalism, the class struggle, and the pressures spontaneously generated by bourgeois society on the working
socialist revolution.”[69] class and its vanguard and ensures that it does not react to events in a
32-3. The launching of the WSWS was a significant break from petty-bourgeois, impressionistic manner. That included an appreciation of
previous forms of party work that were focused on the production and the role of the sections of the IC as the essential ingredient in the
distribution of newspapers. The WSWS enabled the ICFI to regularly development of a revolutionary, socialist movement of the working class
reach an international audience on a scale that was impossible through the and rural masses.
relatively limited sale of newspapers by each of its national sections. The
daily production of the WSWS integrated the work of all sections of the 34. War and militarism
ICFI to an unprecedented degree and concentrated their work on 34-1. The end of the Cold War geopolitical framework led to an
developing the Marxist political and theoretical analysis needed to intensification of imperialist rivalries and the eruption of militarism. US
politically prepare and guide a new revolutionary working class offensive. imperialism, as the sole remaining “superpower”, sought to offset its
In the case of Sri Lanka, collaboration on the WSWS ended the relative economic decline through the aggressive use of its residual military
isolation that the RCL/SEP had suffered for many years. might. Using the pretext of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US put
32-4. The effectiveness of the WSWS as an instrument of political into operation longstanding plans to establish its dominance of the
struggle in every country was decisively confirmed in the extensive energy-rich Middle East. The 1990–91 Gulf War was backed by every
campaign waged by the Sri Lankan SEP and the International Committee imperialist power as the means of legitimising its own future predatory
in 1998 to release four SEP members detained by the LTTE for agitating ambitions, as well as by the Soviet and Chinese regimes and the labour
for the party’s program. Confronted by the impact of the broad bureaucracies in every country. In its 1991 manifesto entitled Oppose
international campaign, including among the Tamil diaspora in North Imperialist War and Colonialism, the ICFI concluded that a new period of
America, Europe and Australia, the LTTE ultimately released the SEP neo-colonialism had opened up. “This ongoing and de facto partition of
members unharmed. Iraq signals the start of a new division of the world by the imperialists.
The conquests and annexations which, according to the opportunist
33. The Sri Lankan crisis of 2000 apologists of imperialism, belonged to a bygone era are once again on the
33-1. At the turn of the millennium, the Sri Lankan government was in order of the day.”[70]
complete disarray following a series of military debacles starting with the 34-2. While the first Gulf War was conducted under the United Nations
fall of Elephant Pass to the LTTE in April 2000. Amid what she described banner, the US-led military intervention against Serbia in 1999 had no
as “the gravest crisis faced by the Colombo rule since 1948”, President such fig leaf. The excuse for NATO’s war in the Balkans—to prevent the
Kumaratunga was desperate for political support. Suddenly, after being genocide of Kosovars—was generalised to a humanitarian pretext to justify
denied official party status for more than two decades, the SEP was further neo-colonial operations. In reality, the Balkans war was part of a
granted formal recognition. A week later, the SEP received a presidential broader US strategy to exploit opportunities opening up following the
invitation to attend an all-party conference to discuss the political crisis. collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly in the newly-established,
In a statement rejecting the invitation, Wije Dias denounced the talks as resource-rich republics of Central Asia. The Bush administration seized
being “to rubberstamp government decisions already made, lend on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as the justification for the
credibility to its policies and garner support for the continuation of a war invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 in furtherance of US

ambitions to subjugate the Middle East and Central Asia. Bush’s new China. The rapid economic rise of China inevitably brings it into
doctrine of “pre-emptive war” was identical to the principal crime for competition with its more established rivals and other emerging powers
which Nazi leaders were tried after World War II—waging a war of such as India, as it scours the world for energy, raw materials and
aggression. The limited opposition to the Iraq war in the UN Security markets. To protect its shipping lanes, China is expanding its military,
Council led by France was based solely on fears that the US was cutting especially naval, power, but this in turn threatens the longstanding US
across the vested interests of other powers in the Middle East. The dominance in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Now the world’s
unprecedented emergence of mass internationally-coordinated protests largest debtor nation, the United States has already lost its post-war
against the invasion of Iraq underlined both the objective, revolutionary position as the world’s economic hegemon and is recklessly using its
potential of the antiwar movement and its political weakness—the fatal residual military might to undermine its rivals. The US will not peacefully
illusion, cultivated by every pseudo-radical organisation, that the war relinquish its previous dominance and China, which is wracked by its own
could be halted through pressure on governments or through the UN. The acute economic and social instabilities, cannot allow Washington to
failure of the protests underscored the basic lesson of Marxism—that war dictate terms. This intensifying rivalry, which is already evident in trade
can only be averted through the independent mobilisation of the working and currency disputes, inexorably draws in other powers and threatens to
class to abolish the underlying cause, the profit system and the outmoded drag humanity into another catastrophic world war.
division of the world into capitalist nation states. 35-3. Asia as a whole has been transformed into an arena of intensifying
34-3. The explosion of American militarism over the past two decades competition between the US and China. To shore up its previously
has had a profoundly destabilising impact around the world, especially in dominant position in North East Asia, Japan is strengthening its military
South Asia. Tensions between Pakistan and India have intensified as each alliance with Washington. India, which harbours its own ambitions to be a
has attempted to deflect acute social tensions at home by stirring up global power, has established a strategic partnership with Washington. In
chauvinist sentiment against its rival. The two countries each tested every country, the ruling class confronts a basic dilemma: how to balance
nuclear weapons in 1998 and almost came to blows in 1999 when between China, now the largest trading partner of virtually every country
Pakistani troops and Islamic militants infiltrated and occupied the Kargil in Asia, and the United States, which is still the world’s largest economy
region of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. After the US compelled and strongest military power. The devastating consequences of this
Pakistan to withdraw support for the militants, the military headed by geopolitical struggle are already evident in Afghanistan, which has been
General Pervez Musharraf seized power. The US further destabilised reduced to a US-dominated colonial outpost in Central Asia, and
Pakistan in 2001 by forcing Musharraf to end support for the Taliban neighbouring Pakistan, which is convulsed by political crisis and conflict.
regime in Afghanistan and assist the US-led military intervention. Taking 35-4. Sri Lanka has been drawn into the vortex of this competition as a
advantage of Washington’s bogus “war on terrorism”, New Delhi took an result of its central position astride the Indian Ocean’s major shipping
increasingly belligerent approach to Islamabad. After Islamic militants lanes. The end of the island’s protracted civil war in 2009 intensified the
attacked the parliament building in New Delhi in December 2001, India rivalry between the US, China and India for the dominant position in
marshalled well over half a million troops along the border with Pakistan. Colombo. As the LTTE’s defeat appeared imminent, the US belatedly
The two nuclear armed powers were poised on the brink of all-out war for recognised that China had greatly expanded its influence by providing
months before backing off. The decade-long neo-colonial occupation of military and economic aid to Sri Lanka. In return, Beijing had been
Afghanistan has spilled over the border into Pakistan and, under President allowed to develop a major new port in the southern town of Hambantota
Obama, has become the AfPak war. Escalating CIA drone attacks and as part of its drive for strategic harbour facilities in the Indian Ocean,
devastating US-backed Pakistani army operations in tribal areas inside including in Burma, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The importance of the
Pakistan have compounded the deep political crisis in Islamabad. Nothing island for Washington was underscored by a US Senate report in
testifies to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie and its agencies in December 2009, which flatly declared that the US “cannot afford to lose
the working class throughout the Indian subcontinent so much as the lack Sri Lanka.” Like its counterparts throughout the region, the Sri Lankan
of any opposition—other than that of reactionary Islamist groups—to the government is engaged in a precarious balancing act that will not prevent
AfPak war, the first direct imperialist intervention in South Asia since the island being drawn into a conflict that will have catastrophic
1947. consequences for the working class.
35-5. The war restarted by President Mahinda Rajapakse in 2006 left the
35. The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of the SEP island in ruins. With the backing of all the major powers, the government
35-1. The global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008 with the and army waged a brutal war of attrition in which tens of thousands of
collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers was not a Tamil civilians were killed and towns and villages reduced to rubble. The
conjunctural economic downturn, but a fundamental breakdown of the war was accompanied by far reaching attacks on democratic rights and the
capitalist order. Optimism that the trillions of dollars injected by imposition of new economic burdens on the working class.
governments to prop up the financial system and major corporations had Pro-government death squads working closely with the military killed or
restabilised the economic system has rapidly faded. The bailouts and “disappeared” hundreds of people including journalists and politicians.
stimulus packages effectively transferred the mountains of bad debt of SEP member Nadarajah Wimaleswaran vanished in March 2007 while
private swindlers and speculators onto the public books and are now being travelling to the navy-controlled island of Kayts. The government, which
imposed on the working class in every country in the form of austerity blocked any investigation of the case, is politically responsible for his
measures. The economic crisis is still unfolding and taking more disappearance and likely murder.
malignant forms. Australian SEP National Secretary Nick Beams 35-6. The end of the civil war has not brought the “peace and
explained: “A breakdown does not mean that capitalism comes to a halt. prosperity” promised by President Rajapakse. Having mortgaged the
It signifies the opening of a new period of history, in which old structures, island to the hilt to pay for the war, the government has been compelled to
both economic and political, as well as ideologies and ways of thinking, make ever deeper cuts to public sector jobs, services and subsidies to the
give way, and new forms of political struggle develop in which the fate of meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Wages have
society itself is up for decision.”[71] been effectively frozen for the past five years while prices, including
35-2. The worsening economic crisis will further exacerbate those of basic staples, have skyrocketed, creating hardships for large
geo-political antagonisms—in the first place between the United States and sections of the working class and oppressed masses. The vast gulf

between rich and poor is underscored by the latest social statistics national project in all the independent states established throughout South
showing that the poorest or bottom 20 percent of society receive only 4.5 Asia after World War II. Nowhere have bourgeois governments been able
percent of total household income compared to 54.1 percent for the top 20 to meet the aspirations of the masses for decent living standards and basic
percent. None of the pressing needs and aspirations of working people democratic rights. Hundreds of millions of people are mired in poverty
find political expression in any section of the Colombo establishment. The and backwardness. The decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka finds its
opposition parties—the UNP and JVP—fully supported the government’s parallels throughout the region in the reactionary exploitation of
war and the pro-market economic agenda being dictated by the IMF on communal, ethnic and language divisions by rival sections of the ruling
behalf of international finance capital. elite to further their own narrow interests. As the working class enters a
35-7. The political weakness of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie is new period of revolutionary convulsions, it is necessary to draw the
highlighted by the Rajapakse government’s dependence on the country’s essential political lessons. It is only through the unification of the working
huge security forces built up over a quarter century of civil war. Nearly class within and across national borders that the necessary revolutionary
two years after the end of the war, draconian emergency powers are still force can be developed for the overthrow of the outmoded system of
in force and none of the troops have been demobilised. Instead, the capitalism and its replacement by a world planned socialist economy. The
military is intruding into aspects of government previously regarded as SEP seeks to revive the best revolutionary traditions of the BLPI and
strictly civilian, such as the huge Colombo slum clearance program that bases itself on the ICFI’s program by fighting for the unity of workers
will forcibly displace 60,000 families. The militarisation of life is and the oppressed masses for a United Socialist States of South Asia as an
summed up in Rajapakse’s exhortations to workers to sacrifice like integral part of the world socialist revolution.
soldiers to “build the nation.” Increasingly the Rajapakse regime has 35-11. Persistent economic crises, sharpening inter-imperialist
functioned as a politico-military cabal operating with scant regard for antagonisms, the growth of militarism, deepening social inequality and
parliament, the constitution or the courts. The police state apparatus is the profound alienation of ordinary people from existing political parties
above all directed at the suppression of any opposition by the working and structures are all unmistakable signs of a new protracted period of
class and rural masses. wars and revolutions. The upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East
35-8. None of the underlying issues that led to the protracted civil war are the latest confirmation that the crisis of capitalism is generating
has been resolved by the LTTE’s military defeat. Six decades after formal immense class struggles. However, there remains a huge gap between the
independence, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie has only managed to cling onto advanced character of capitalist breakdown and the present political
power by fracturing the island along communal lines. It has maintained consciousness of the working class. That can only be overcome through a
unity solely by force of arms, currently manifest in the massive military patient and intransigent political struggle by the revolutionary party
occupation of the North and East. The legitimate grievances and anger felt against the agencies of Social Democracy, Stalinism and Pabloism that
by Tamils over decades of entrenched discrimination will inevitably erupt block the independent mobilisation of the working class. In doing so, the
in new forms. The necessary political lessons have to be drawn, however. SEP will encourage and assist the development of new independent
The LTTE’s defeat was not primarily a military one, but was the product organisations of the working class. Through a consistent political struggle
of the inherent weaknesses of its political perspective. From the outset, its in the working class, the party will seek to forge the necessary alliance
aim was to carve out a capitalist Eelam on behalf of the Tamil bourgeoisie between the proletariat and peasantry that is essential for the
with the backing of India or other regional and world powers. When these establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government.
same powers decisively turned against it, the LTTE was reduced to 35-12. The central issue, however, remains to construct a revolutionary
impotent pleading to the “international community” to halt the military leadership to raise the consciousness of the working class to its
onslaught. The only social force in society capable of waging a struggle international and historic tasks. Only a party based on the most advanced
for genuine democratic rights against the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its scientific theory that has drawn the necessary lessons of the previous
imperialist backers is the working class. However, the LTTE was always strategic experiences of the international working class is capable of
organically opposed to any orientation to unite workers—Tamil and fulfilling that role. The International Committee of the Fourth
Sinhala—on a class basis. Its indiscriminate attacks on Sinhalese civilians International and its sections alone embody the historical heritage of
played into the hands of the Colombo establishment and deepened the contemporary Marxism—that is, of Trotskyism. It is on that basis that the
communal divide. In areas under its control, the LTTE rode roughshod SEP and its sister parties of the ICFI seek to educate, mobilise and unify
over the democratic rights and social needs of working people. Thus, as it the international working class, confident that the most far sighted and
made its final stand, the LTTE leadership was completely incapable of self-sacrificing workers and youth will be won to its banner and provide
making any broad appeal to Tamil masses, let alone to the working class the material forces for carrying out the world socialist revolution.
throughout the island and region. The LTTE’s collapse is graphic proof Concluded
of the bankruptcy of all tendencies based on bourgeois separatism. Footnotes:
35-9. The past quarter century of war has tested out every political 69. The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist
tendency. Only the SEP has proven capable of waging a consistent Equality Party (Australia) (Mehring Books, Sydney, 2010), p. 146.
political struggle in defence of the democratic rights of Tamils and 70. Fourth International, Volume 18, No. 1, Summer–Fall 1991, p. 2.
working people as a whole, as an essential component of its strategy for a 71. Nick Beams, The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis
Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The SEP’s ability to (October 2008) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/nbe1-o04.html.
withstand attacks, political and physical, from all sides stems from the
strength of the principles on which it is based. The defence and
development of the theory and strategy of Permanent Revolution is the To contact the WSWS and the
only means of fighting for the political independence of the working class Socialist Equality Party visit:
from all factions of the bourgeoisie. In conducting an uncompromising
struggle for Trotskyism over more than four decades, the SEP has struck
deep roots in the working class and established itself as the only party that
defends the historic interests of working people.
35-10. Sri Lanka demonstrates in microcosm the complete failure of the

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The Historical and International Foundations of The Socialist Equality Party Sri Lanka

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Adopted unanimously by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at

its founding congress in Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011, this document is

The founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

© World Socialist Web Site

To contact the WSWS and the

© World Socialist Web Site

The Historical and International Foundations